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MENTAL EFFICIENCY 



BY ARNOLD BENNETT 



Novels 

THE OLD WIVES' TALE 

HELEN WITH THE HIGH HAND 

THE BOOK OF CARLOTTA 

BURIED ALIVE 

A GREAT MAN 

LEONORA 

WHOM GOD HATH JOINED 

A MAN FROM THE NORTH 

ANNA OF THE FIVE TOWNS 

Smaller Books 

HOW TO LIVE ON 24 HOURS A 

DAY 
THE HUMAN MACHINE 
LITERARY TASTE 
MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

Drama 

CUPID AND COMMONSENSE 
WHAT THE PUBLIC WANTS 

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK 



MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

AND OTHER HINTS 

TO 
MEN AND WOMEN 

BY 

ARNOLD BENNETT 

Author of " How to Live on 24 Hours a Day " 
"The Old Wives' Tale," etc. 



GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS NEW YORK 



1* 



<6 



J^V' 



Copyright, 1911 
By George H. Doran Company 



-^,- 
V 



(C)CI.A28i;oC2 



CONTENTS 

Page 

I. Mental Efficiency 7 

The Appeal 7 

The Replies 13 

The Cure 19 

Mental Calisthenics 24 

II. Expressing One's Individuality ... 32 

III. Breaking with the Past ..... 39 

IV. Settling Down in Life 45 

V. Marriage 53 

The Duty of It 53 

The Adventure of It 59 

The Two Ways of It 65 

VI. Books 72 

The Physical Side 72 

The Philosophy of Book Buying . 78 

VII. Success 84 

Candid Remarks 84 

The Successful and the Unsuc- 
cessful 91 

The Inwardness of Success ... 97 

VIII. The Petty Artificialities 104 

IX. The Secret of Content 112 



I 

MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

THE APPEAL 

IF there is any virtue in advertisements — 
and a journalist should be the last person 
to say that there is not — the American na- 
tion is rapidly reaching a state of physical effi- 
ciency of which the world has probably not 
seen the like since Sparta. In all the American 
newspapers and all the American monthlies are 
innumerable illustrated announcements of " phy- 
sical-culture specialists," who guarantee to make 
all the organs of the body perform their duties 
with the mighty precision of a 60 h.p. motor-car 
that never breaks down. I saw a book the other 
day written by one of these specialists, to show 
how perfect health could be attained by devoting 
a quarter of an hour a day to certain exercises. 
The advertisements multiply and increase in 
size. They cost a great deal of money. There- 
fore they must bring in a great deal of business. 



8 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

Therefore vast numbers of people must be wor- 
ried about the non-efficiency of their bodies, and 
on the way to achieve efficiency. In our more 
modest British fashion, we have the same phe- 
nomenon in England. And it is growing. Our 
muscles are growing also. Surprise a man in his 
bedroom of a morning, and you will find him 
lying on his back on the floor, or standing on his 
head, or whirling clubs, in pursuit of physical 
efficiency. I remember that once I " v/ent in " 
for physical efficiency myself. I, too, lay on. the 
floor, my delicate epidermis separated from the 
carpet by only the thinnest of garments, and I 
contorted myself according to the fifteen dia- 
grams of a large chart (believed to be the 
magna, charta of physical efficiency) daily after 
shaving. In three weeks my collars would not 
meet round my prize-fighter's neck; my hosier 
reaped immense profits, and I came to the con- 
clusion that I had carried physical efficiency 
quite far enough. 

A strange thing — was it not? — that I never 
had the idea of devoting a quarter of an hour a 
day after shaving to the pursuit of mental effi- 
ciency. The average body is a pretty compli- 



MENTAL EFFICIENCY g 

cated affair, sadly out of order, but happily 
susceptible to culture. The average mind is 
vastly more complicated, not less sadly out of 
order, but perhaps even more susceptible to cul- 
ture. We compare our arms to the arms of the 
gentleman illustrated in the physical efficiency 
advertisement, and we murmur to ourselves the 
classic phrase : " This will never do." And we 
set about developing the muscles of our arms 
until we can show them off (through a frock 
coat) to women at afternoon tea. But it does 
not, perhaps, occur to us that the mind has its 
muscles, and a lot of apparatus besides, and that 
these invisible, yet paramount, mental organs 
are far less efficient than they ought to be; that 
some of them are atrophied, others starved, others 
out of shape, etc. A man of sedentary occupation 
goes for a very long walk on Easter Monday, and 
in the evening is so exhausted that he can scarcely 
eat. He wakes up to the inefficiency of his body, 
caused by his neglect of it, and he is so shocked 
that he determines on remedial measures. Either 
he will walk to the office, or he will play golf, or 
he will execute the post-shaving exercises. But 
let the same man after a prolonged sedentary 
course of newspapers, magazines, and novels, take 



10 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

his mind out for a stiff climb among the rocks of 
a scientific, philosophic, or artistic subject. What 
will he do? Will he stay out all day, and return 
in the evening too tired even to read his paper? 
Not he. It is ten to one that, finding himself puf- 
fing for breath after a quarter of an hour, he 
won't even persist till he gets his second wind, 
but will come back at once. Will he remark with 
genuine concern that his mind is sadly out of 
condition and that he really must do something 
to get it into order? Not he. It is a hundred to 
one that he will tranquilly accept the status quo, 
without shame and without very poignant regret. 
Do I make my meaning clear? 

I say, without a -very poignant regret, because 
a certain vague regret is indubitably caused by 
realizing that one is handicapped by a mental 
inefficiency which might, without too much diffi- 
culty, be cured. That vague regret exudes like 
a vapour from the more cultivated section of the 
public. It is to be detected everywhere, and es- 
pecially among people who are near the half-way 
house of life. They perceive the existence of im- 
mense quantities of knowledge, not the smallest 
particle of which will they ever make their own. 



MENTAL EFFICIENCY ii 

They stroll forth from their orderly dwellings on 
a starlit night, and feel dimly the wonder of the 
heavens. But the still small voice is telling them 
that, though they have read in a newspaper that 
there are fifty thousand stars in the Pleiades, they 
cannot even point to the Pleiades in the sky. How 
they would like to grasp the significance of the 
nebular theory, the most overwhelming of all the- 
ories! And the years are passing; and there are 
twenty-four hours in every day, out of which they 
work only six or seven ; and it needs only an im- 
pulse, an effort, a system, in order gradually to 
cure the mind of its slackness, to give " tone " to 
its muscles, and to enable it to grapple with the 
splendours of knowledge and sensation that await 
it ! But the regret is not poignant enough. They 
do nothing. They go on doing nothing. It is as 
though they passed for ever along the length of 
an endless table filled with delicacies, and could 
not stretch out a hand to seize. Do I exaggerate? 
Is there not deep in the consciousness of most of 
us a mournful feeling that our minds are like the 
liver of the advertisement — sluggish, and that for 
the sluggishness of our minds there is the excuse 
neither of incompetence, nor of lack of time, nor 
of lack of opportunity, nor of lack of means? 



12 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

Why does not some mental efficiency specialist 
come forward and show us how to make our 
minds do the work which our minds are certainly 
capable of doing? I do not mean a quack. All 
the physical efficiency specialists who advertise 
largely are not quacks. Some of them achieve 
very genuine results. If a course of treatment 
can be devised for the body, a course of treatment 
can be devised for the mind. Thus we might 
realize some of the ambitions which all of us 
cherish in regard to the utilization in our spare 
time of that magnificent machine which we allow 
to rust within our craniums. We have the desire 
to perfect ourselves, to round off our careers with 
the graces of knowledge and taste. How many 
people would not gladly undertake some branch 
of serious study, so that they might not die under 
the reproach of having lived and died without 
ever really having known anything about any- 
thing! It is not the absence of desire that pre- 
vents them. It is, first, the absence of will-power 
— not the will to begin, but the will to continue ; 
and, second, a mental apparatus which is out of 
condition, " puffy," " weedy," through sheer neg- 
lect. The remedy, then, divides itself into two 
parts, the cultivation of will-power, and the get- 



MENTAL EFFICIENCY 13 

ting into condition of the mental apparatus. And 
these two branches of the cure must be worked 
concurrently. 

I am sure that the considerations which I have 
presented to you must have already presented 
themselves to tens of thousands of my readers, 
and that thousands must have attempted the 
cure. I doubt not that many have succeeded. I 
shall deem it a favour if those readers who have 
interested themselves in the question will com- 
municate to me at once the result of their ex- 
perience, whatever its outcome. I will make 
such use as I can of the letters I receive, and 
afterwards I will give my own experience. 

THE REPLIES 

The correspondence which I have received 
in answer to my appeal shows that at any 
rate I did not overstate the case. There 
is, among a vast mass of reflecting peo- 
ple in this country, a clear consciousness of 
being mentally less than efficient, and a strong 
(though ineffective) desire that such mental in- 
efficiency should cease to be. The desire is 
stronger than I had imagined, but it does not 



14 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

seem to have led to much hitherto. And that 
" course o£ treatment for the mind," by means of 
which we are to " realize some of the ambitions 
which all of us cherish in regard to the utilization 
in our spare time of the magnificent machine 
which we allow to rust within our craniums " 

— that desiderated course of treatment has not 
apparently been devised by anybody. The San- 
dow of the brain has not yet loomed up above 
the horizon. On the other hand, there appears 
to be a general expectancy that I personally am 
going to play the role of the Sandow of the brain. 
Vain thought! 

I have been very much interested in the letters, 
some of which, as a statement of the matter in 
question, are admirable. It is perhaps not sur- 
prising that the best of them come from women 

— for (genius apart) woman is usually more 
touchingly lyrical than man in the yearning for 
the ideal. The most enthusiastic of all the let- 
ters I have received, however, is from a gentle- 
man whose notion is that we should be hypno- 
tised into mental efficiency. After advocating the 
establishment of " an institution of practical psy- 
chology from whence there can be graduated fit 



MENTAL EFFICIENCY 15 

and proper people whose efforts would be in the 
direction of the subconscious mental mechanism 
of the child or even the adult," this hypnotist 
proceeds : " Between the academician, whose 
specialty is an inconsequential cobweb, the medi- 
cal man who has got it into his head that he is 
the logical foster-father for psychonomical mat- 
ters, and the blatant * professor ' who deals with 
monkey tricks on a few somnambules on the 
music-hall stage, you are allowing to go unrecog- 
nized one of the most potent factors of mental de- 
velopment." Am I? I have not the least idea 
what this gentleman means, but I can assure him 
that he is wrong. I can make more sense out of 
the remarks of another correspondent who, ut- 
terly despising the things of the mind, compares 
a certain class of young men to " a halfpenny 
bloater with the roe out," and asserts that 
he himself " got out of the groove " by dint of 
having to unload ten tons of coal in three hours 
and a half every day during several years. This 
is interesting and it is constructive, but it is just 
a little beside the point. 

A lady, whose optimism is indicated by her 
pseudonym, " Esperance," puts her finger on the 
spot, or, rather, on one of the spots, in a very 



i6 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

sensible letter. " It appears to me," she says, 
" that the great cause of mental inefBciency is 
lack of concentration, perhaps especially in the 
case of women. I can trace my chief failures to 
this cause. Concentration is a talent. It may be 
in a measure cultivated, but it needs to be inborn. 
. . . The greater number of us are in a state of 
semi-slumber, with minds which are only exerted 
to one-half of their capability." I thoroughly 
agree that inability to concentrate is one of the 
chief symptoms of the mental machine being out 
of condition. " Esperance's " suggested cure is 
rather drastic. She says : " Perhaps one of the 
best cures for mental sedentariness is arithmetic, 
for there is nothing else which requires greater 
power of concentration." Perhaps arithmetic 
might be an effective cure, but it is not a practical 
cure, because no one, or scarcely any one, would 
practise it. I cannot imagine the plain man who, 
having a couple of hours to spare of a night, and 
having also the sincere desire but not the will- 
power to improve his taste and knowledge, would 
deliberately sit down and work sums by way of 
preliminary mental calisthenics. As Ibsen's pup- 
pet said : " People don't do these things." Why 
do they not? The answer is: Simply because 



MENTAL EFFICIENCY 17 

they won't; simply because human nature will 
not run to it. " Esperance's " suggestion of 
learning poetry is slightly better. 

Certainly the best letter I have had is from 
Miss H. D. She says : " This idea [to avoid the 
reproach of * living and dying without ever really 
knowing anything about anything '] came to me 
of itself from somewhere when I was a small girl. 
And looking back I fancy that the thought itself 
spurred me to do something in this world, to get 
into line with people who did things — people 
who painted pictures, wrote books, built bridges, 
or did something beyond the ordinary. This only 
has seemed to me, all my life since, worth while." 
Here I must interject that such a statement is 
somewhat sweeping. In fact, it sweeps a whole 
lot of fine and legitimate ambitions straight into 
the rubbish heap of the Not-worth-while. I think 
the writer would wish to modify it. She con- 
tinues : " And when the day comes in which I 
have not done some serious reading, however 
small the measure, or some writing ... or I have 
been too sad or dull to notice the brightness of 
colour of the sun, of grass and flowers, of the 
sea, or the moonlight on the water, I think the 



i8 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

day ill-spent. So I must think the incenti've to do 
a little each day beyond the ordinary towards 
the real culture of the mind, is the beginning of 
the cure of mental inefficiency." This is very in- 
genious and good. Further : " The day comes 
when the mental habit has become a part of our 
life, and we value mental work for the work's 
sake." But I am not sure about that. For my- 
self, I have never valued work for its own sake, 
and I never shall. And I only value such mental 
work for the more full and more intense con- 
sciousness of being alive which it gives me. 

Miss H. D.'s remedies are vague. As to lack of 
will-power, " the first step is to realize your weak- 
ness; the next step is to have ordinary shame 
that you are defective." I doubt, I gravely doubt, 
if these steps would lead to anything definite. 
Nor is this very helpful : " I would advise reading, 
observing, writing. I would advise the use of 
every sense and every faculty by which we at 
last learn the sacredness of life." This is beg- 
ging the question. If people, by merely wishing 
to do so, could regularly and seriously read, 
observe, write, and use every faculty and sense, 
there would be very little mental inefficiency. I 



MENTAL EFFICIENCY 19 

see that I shall be driven to construct a pro- 
gramme out of my own bitter and ridiculous 
experiences. 

THE CURE 

" But tasks in hours of insight willed 
Can be through hours of gloom fulfilled." 

The above lines from Matthew Arnold 
are quoted by one of my very numerous cor- 
respondents to support a certain optimism in 
this matter of a systematic attempt to im- 
prove the mind. They form part of a beautiful 
and inspiring poem, but I gravely fear that they 
run counter to the vast mass of earthly experi- 
ence. More often than not I have found that a 
task willed in some hour of insight can not be ful- 
filled through hours of gloom. No, no, and 
no! To will is easy: it needs but the momen- 
tary bright contagion of a stronger spirit than 
one's own. To fulfil, morning after morning, or 
evening after evening, through months and years 
— this is the very dickens, and there is not one 
of my readers that will not agree with me. Yet 
such is the elastic quality of human nature that 
most of my correspondents are quite ready to 
ignore the sad fact and to demand at once: 



20 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

"what shall we will? Tell us what we must will." 
Some seem to think that they have solved the 
difficulty when they have advocated certain sys- 
tems of memory and mind-training. Such systems 
may be in themselves useful or useless — the 
evidence furnished to me is contradictory — but 
were they perfect systems, a man cannot be 
intellectually born again merely by joining a 
memory-class. The best system depends utterly 
on the man's power of resolution. And what 
really counts is not the system, but the spirit 
in which the man handles it. Now, the proper 
spirit can only be induced by a careful considera- 
tion and realization of the man's conditions — 
the limitations of his temperament, the strength 
of adverse influences, and the lessons of his past. 

Let me take an average case. Let me take 
your case, O man or woman of thirty, living in 
comfort, with some cares, and some responsi- 
bilities, and some pretty hard daily work, but not 
too much of any! The question of mental effi- 
ciency is in the air. It interests you. It touches 
you nearly. Your conscience tells you that your 
mind is less active and less informed than it 
might be. You suddenly spring up from the 



MENTAL EFFICIENCY 21 

garden-seat, and you say to yourself that you 
will take your mind in hand and do something 
with it. Wait a moment. Be so good as to sink 
back into that garden-seat and clutch that tennis 
racket a little longer. You have had these " hours 
of insight " before, you know. You have not 
arrived at the age of thirty without having tried 
to carry out noble resolutions — and failed. What 
precautions are you going to take against failure 
this time? For your will is probably no stronger 
now than it was aforetime. You have admitted 
and accepted failure in the past. And no wound 
is more cruel to the spirit of resolve than that 
dealt by failure. You fancy the wound closed, 
but just at the critical moment it may reopen 
and mortally bleed you. What are your precau- 
tions? Have you thought of them? No. You 
have not. 

I have not the pleasure of your acquaintance. 
But I know you because I know myself. Your 
failure in the past was due to one or more of three 
causes. And the first was that you undertook 
too much at the beginning. You started off with 
a magnificent programme. You are something 
of an expert in physical exercises — you would 



22 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

be ashamed not to be, in these physical days — 
and so you would never attempt a hurdle race 
or an uninterrupted hour's club-whirling without 
some preparation. The analogy between the body 
and the mind ought to have struck you. This 
time, please do not form an elaborate programme. 
Do not form any programme. Simply content 
yourself with a preliminary canter, a ridiculously 
easy preliminary canter. For example (and I 
give this merely as an example), you might say to 
yourself: "Within one month from this date I 
will read twice Herbert Spencer's little book on 
* Education ' — sixpence — and will make notes 
in pencil inside the back cover of the things that 
particularly strike me." You remark that that 
is nothing, that you can do it " on your head," 
and so on. Well, do it. When it is done you will 
at any rate possess the satisfaction of having re- 
solved to do something and having done it. Your 
mind will have gained tone and healthy pride. 
You will be even justified in setting yourself some 
kind of a simple programme to extend over three 
months. And you will have acquired some gen- 
eral principles by the light of which to construct 
the programme. But best of all, you will have 
avoided failure, that dangerous wound. 



MENTAL EFFICIENCY 23 

The second possible cause of previous failure 
was the disintegrating effect on the will-power of 
the ironic, superior smile of friends. Whenever a 
man " turns over a new leaf " he has this inane 
giggle to face. The drunkard may be less 
ashamed of getting drunk than of breaking to a 
crony the news that he has signed the pledge. 
Strange, but true! And human nature must be 
counted with. Of course, on a few stern spirits 
the effect of that smile is merely to harden the 
resolution. But on the majority its influence is 
deleterious. Therefore don't go and nail your flag 
to the mast. Don't raise any flag. Say nothing. 
Work as unobtrusively as you can. When you 
have won a battle or two you can begin to wave 
the banner, and then you will find that that 
miserable, pitiful, ironic, superior smile will die 
away ere it is born. 

The third possible cause was that you did not 
rearrange your day. Idler and time-waster 
though you have been, still you had done something 
during the twenty-four hours. You went to work 
with a kind of dim idea that there were twenty-six 
hours in every day. Something large ana definite 
has to be dropped* Some space in the rank jungle 



24 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

of the day has to be cleared and swept up for the 
new operations. Robbing yourself of sleep won't 
help you, nor trying to " squeeze in " a time for 
study between two other times. Use the knife, 
and use it freely. If you mean to read or think 
half an hour a day, arrange for an hour. A hun- 
dred per cent, margin is not too much for a begin- 
ner. Do you ask me where the knife is to be used? 
I should say that in nine cases out of ten the rites 
of the cult of the body might be abbreviated. I 
recently spent a week-end in a Loi^don suburb, 
and I was staggered by the wholesale attention 
given to physical recreation in all its forms. It 
was a gigantic debauch of the muscles on every 
side. It shocked me. " Poor withering mind ! " 
I thought. " Cricket, and football, and boating, 
and golf, and tennis have their * seasons,' but not 
thou ! " These considerations are general and 
prefatory. Now I must come to detail. 

MENTAL CALISTHENICS 

I have dealt with the state of mind in 
which one should begin a serious effort towards 
mental efficiency, and also with the probable 
causes of failure in previous efforts. We come 
now to what I may call the calisthenics of the 



MENTAL EFFICIENCY 25 

business, exercises which may be roughly com- 
pared to the technical exercises necessary in learn- 
ing to play a musical instrument. It is curious 
that a person studying a musical instrument will 
have no false shame whatever in doing mere 
exercises for the fingers and wrists while a per- 
son who is trying to get his mind into order will 
almost certainly experience a false shame in going 
through performances which are undoubtedly 
good for him. Herein lies one of the great ob- 
stacles to mental efficiency. Tell a man that he 
should join a memory class, and he will hum and 
haw, and say, as I have already remarked, that 
memory is n't everything ; and, in short, he won't 
join the memory class, partly from indolence, I 
grant, but more from false shame. (Is not this 
true?) He will even hesitate about learning 
things by heart. Yet there are few mental exer- 
cises better than learning great poetry or prose 
by heart. Twenty lines a week for six months: 
what a " cure " for debility ! The chief, but not 
the only, merit of learning by heart as an exercise 
is that it compels the mind to concentrate. And 
the most important preliminary to self-develop- 
ment is the faculty of concentrating at will. An- 
other excellent exercise is to read a page of no- 



26 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

matter-what, and then immediately to write down 
— in one's own words or in the author's — one's 
full recollection of it. A quarter of an hour a day ! 
No more! And it works like magic. 

This brings me to the department of writing. 
I am a writer by profession; but I do not think 
I have any prejudices in favour of the exercise 
of writing. Indeed, I say to myself every morn- 
ing that if there is one exercise in the world 
which I hate, it is the exercise of writing. But I 
must assert that in my opinion the exercise of 
writing is an indispensable part of any genuine 
effort towards mental efficiency. I don't care 
much what you write, so long as you compose 
sentences and achieve continuity. There are 
forty ways of writing in an unprofessional man- 
ner, and they are all good. You may keep " a 
full diary," as Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson 
says he does. This is one of the least good ways. 
Diaries, save in experienced hands like those of 
Mr. Benson, are apt to get themselves done with 
the very minimum of mental effort. They also 
tend to an exaggeration of egotism, and if they 
are left lying about they tend to strife. Further, 
one never knows when one may not be com- 



MENTAL EFFICIENCY 27 

pelled to produce them in a court o£ law. A 
journal is better. Do not ask me to define the 
difference between a journal and a diary. I will 
not and I cannot. It is a difference that one 
feels instinctively. A diary treats exclusively of 
one's self and one's doings; a journal roams 
wider, and notes whatever one has observed of 
interest. A diary relates that one had lobster 
mayonnaise for dinner and rose the next morn- 
ing with a headache, doubtless attributable to 

mental strain. A journal relates that Mrs. , 

whom one took into dinner, had brown eyes, 
and an agreeable trick of throwing back her 
head after asking a question, and gives her ac- 
count of her husband's strange adventures in 
Colorado, etc. A diary is 

All 1, 1, 1, 1, itself I 
(to quote a line of the transcendental poetry of 
Mary Baker G. Eddy). A journal is the large 
spectacle of life. A journal may be special or 
general. I know a man who keeps a journal of 
all cases of current superstition which he actually 
encounters. He began it without the slightest 
suspicion that he was beginning a document of 
astounding interest and real scientific value ; but 
such was the fact. In default of a diary or a 



28 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

journal, one may write essays (provided one has 

the moral courage) ; or one may simply make 
notes on the book one reads. Or one may con- 
struct anthologies of passages which have made 
an individual and particular appeal to one's 
tastes. Anthology construction is one of the 
pleasantest hobbies that a person who is not mad 
about golf and bridge — that is to say, a thinking 
person — can possibly have ; and I recommend 
it to those who, discreetly mistrusting their 
power to keep up a fast pace from start to finish, 
are anxious to begin their intellectual course 
gently and m.ildly. In any event, writing — the 
act of writing — is vital to almost any scheme. 
I would say it was vital to every scheme, with- 
out exception, were I not sure that some kind cor- 
respondent would instantly point out a scheme 
to which writing was obviously not vital. 

After writing comes thinking. (The sequence 
may be considered odd, but I adhere to it.) In 
this connexion I cannot do better than quote an 
admirable letter which I have received from a 
correspondent who wishes to be known only as 
" An Oxford Lecturer." The italics (except the 
last) are mine, not his. He says : " Till a man 



MENTAL EFFICIENCY 29 

has got his physical brain completely under his 
control — suppressing Us too-great receptivity^ its 
tendencies to reproduce idly the thoughts of others, 
and to be sm)ayed by every passing gust of emotion 
— I hold that he cannot do a tenth part of the 
work that he would then be able to perform with 
little or no effort. Moreover, work apart, he has 
not entered upon his kingdom, and unlimited pos- 
sibilities of future development are barred to 
him. Mental efficiency can be gained by constant 
practice in meditation — i. e., by concentrating 
the mind, say, for but ten minutes daily, but with 
absolute regularity, on some of the highest 
thoughts of which it is capable. Failures will be 
frequent, but they must be regarded with simple 
indifference and dogged perseverance in the path 
chosen. If that path be followed <without inter- 
mission even for a few weeks the results will speak 
for themselves." I thoroughly agree with what 
this correspondent says, and am obliged to him 
for having so ably stated the case. But I regard 
such a practice of meditation as he indicates as 
being rather an " advanced " exercise for a be- 
ginner. After the beginner has got under way, 
and gained a little confidence in his strength of 
purpose, and acquired the skill to define his 



30 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

thoughts sufficiently to write them down — -then 
it would be time enough, in my view, to under- 
take what " An Oxford Lecturer " suggests. By 
the way, he highly recommends Mrs. Annie 
Besant's book, Thought Poiver: Its Control and 
Cattare* He says that it treats the subject with 
scientific clearness, and gives a practical method 
of training the mind. I endorse the latter part 
of the statement. 

So much for the more or less technical processes 
of stirring the mind from its sloth and making 
it exactly obedient to the aspirations of the soul. 
And here I close. Numerous correspondents have 
asked me to outline a course of reading for them. 
In other words, they have asked me to particu- 
larize for them the aspirations of their souls. 
My subject, however, was not self-development. 
My subject was mental efficiency as a means to 
self-development. Of course, one can only ac- 
quire mental efficiency in the actual effort of self- 
development. But I was concerned, not with the 
choice of route; rather with the manner of fol- 
lowing the route. You say to me that I am busy- 
ing myself with the best method of walking, and 
refusing to discuss where to go. Precisely. One 



MENTAL EFFICIENCY 31 

man cannot tell another man where the other 
man wants to go. 

If he can't himself decide on a goal he may | 
as well curl up and expire, for the root of the f 
matter is not in him. I will content myself with 
pointing out that the entire universe is open for 
inspection. Too many people fancy that self- 
development means literature. They associate 
the higher life with an intimate knowledge of 
the life of Charlotte Bronte, or the order of the 
plays of Shakespeare. The higher life may just 
as well be butterflies, or funeral customs, or 
county boundaries, or street names, or mosses, 
or stars, or slugs, as Charlotte Bronte or Shake- 
speare. Choose what interests you. Lots of 
finely-organized, mentally-efficient persons can't 
read Shakespeare at any price, and if you asked 
them who was the author of The Tenant cf Wild- 
fell Hall they might proudly answer Emily 
Bronte, if they did n't say they never heard of it. 
An accurate knowledge of any subject, coupled ] 
with a carefully nurtured sense of the relativity 
of that subject to other subjects, implies an 
enormous self-development. With this hint I 
conclude. 



32 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 



II 

EXPRESSING ONE'S 
INDIVIDUALITY 

A MOST curious and useful thing to realize 
is that one never knows the impression 
one is creating on other people. One 
may often guess pretty accurately whether it is 
good, bad, or indifferent — some people render 
it unnecessary for one to guess, they practically 
inform one — but that is not what I mean. I 
mean much more than that. I mean that one has 
one's self no mental picture corresponding to the 
mental picture which one's personality leaves in 
the minds of one's friends. Has it ever struck 
you that there is a mysterious individual going 
around, walking the streets, calling at houses for 
tea, chatting, laughing, grumbling, arguing, and 
that all your friends know him and have long 
since added him up and come to a definite con- 
clusion about him — without saying more than a 
chance, cautious word to you; and that that 
person is you? Supposing that you came into a 



EXPRESSING INDIVIDUALITY 33 

drawing-room where you were having tea, do 
you think you would recognize yourself as an 
individuality? I think not. You would be apt to 
say to yourself, as guests do when disturbed in 
drawing-rooms by other guests : " Who 's this 
chap? Seems rather queer. I hope he won't be 
a bore." And your first telling would be slightly 
hostile. Why, even when you meet yourself in 
an unsuspected mirror in the very clothes that 
you have put on that very day and that you know 
by heart, you are almost always shocked by the 
realization that you are you. And now and then, 
when you have gone to the glass to arrange your 
hair in the full sobriety of early morning, have you 
not looked on an absolute stranger, and has not 
that stranger piqued your curiosity? And if it 
is thus with precise external details of form, 
colour, and movement, what may it not be with 
the vague complex effect of the mental and moral 
individuality? 

A man honestly tries to make a good impres- 
sion. What is the result? The result merely is 
that his friends, in the privacy of their minds, 
set him down as a man who tries to make a good 
impression. If much depends on the result of a 



34 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

single interview, or a couple of interviews, a man 
may conceivably force another to accept an im- 
pression of himself which he would like to con- 
vey. But if the receiver of the impression is to 
have time at his disposal, then the giver of the 
impression may just as well sit down and put 
his hands in his pockets, for nothing that he can 
do will modify or influence in any way the im- 
pression that he will ultimately give. The real 
impress is, in the end, given unconsciously, not 
consciously; and further, it is received uncon- 
sciously, not consciously. It depends partly on 
both persons. And it is immutably fixed before- 
hand. There can be no final deception. Take 
the extreme case, that of the mother and her son. 
One hears that the son hoodwinks his mother. 
Not he! If he is cruel, neglectful, overbearing, 
she is perfectly aware of it. He does not deceive 
her, and she does not deceive herself. I have 
often thought: If a son could look into a 
mother's heart, what an eye-opener he would 
have ! " What ! " he would cry. " This cold, im- 
partial judgment, this keen vision for my faults, 
this implacable memory of little slights, and in- 
justices, and callousnesses committed long ago, 
in the breast of my mother ! " Yes, my friend, in 



EXPRESSING INDIVIDUALITY 35 

the breast o£ your mother. The only difference 
between your mother and another person is that 
she takes you as you are, and loves you for what 
you are. She is n't blind : do not imagine it. 

The marvel is, not that people are such bad 
judges of character, but that they are such good 
judges, especially of what I may call fundamental 
character. The wiliest person cannot for ever 
conceal his fundamental character from the 
simplest. And people are very stern judges, 
too. Think of your best friends — are you 
oblivious of their defects? On the contrary, 
you are perhaps too conscious of them. When 
you summon them before your mind's eye, it is 
no ideal creation that you see. When you meet 
them and talk to them you are constantly mak- 
ing reservations in their disfavour — unless, of 
course, you happen to be a schoolgirl gushing 
over like a fountain with enthusiasm. It is 
well, when one is judging a friend, to remember 
that he is judging you with the same godlike 
and superior impartiality. It is well to grasp 
the fact that you are going through life under 
the scrutiny of a band of acquaintances who are 
subject to very few illusions about you, whose 
views of you are, indeed, apt to be harsh and 



36 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

even cruel. Above all it is advisable to compre- 
hend thoroughly that the things in your indi- 
viduality which annoy your friends most are the 
things of which you are completely unconscious. 
It is not until years have passed that one begins 
to be able to form a dim idea of what one has 
looked like to one's friends. At forty one goes 
back ten years, and one says sadly, but with a 
certain amusement : " I must have been pretty 
blatant then. I can see how I must have exas- 
perated 'em. And yet I had n't the faintest no- 
tion of it at the time. My intentions were of 
the best. Only I did n't know enough." And 
one recollects some particularly crude action, 
and kicks one's self. . . . Yes, that is all very 
well; and the enlightenment which has come 
with increasing age is exceedingly satisfactory. 
But you are forty now. What shall you be say- 
ing of yourself at fifty? Such reflections foster 
humility, and they foster also a reluctance, which 
it is impossible to praise too highly, to tread on 
other people's toes. 

A moment ago I used the phrase " funda- 
mental character." It is a reminiscence of 
Stevenson's phrase " fimdamental decency." And 



EXPRESSING INDIVIDUALITY 37 

it is the final test by which one judges one's 
friends. " After all, he 's a decent fellow." We 
must be able to use that formula concerning our 
friends. Kindliness of heart is not the greatest 
of human qualities- — and its general effect on 
the progress of the world is not entirely benefi- 
cent — but it is the greatest of human qualities in 
friendship. It is the least dispensable quality. 
We come back to it with relief from more bril- 
liant qualities. And it has the great advantage 
of always going with a broad mind. Narrow- 
minded people are never kind-hearted. You may 
be inclined to dispute this statement: please 
think it over; I am inclined to uphold it. 

We can forgive the absence of any quality 
except kindliness of heart. And when a man 
lacks that, we blame him, we will not forgive 
him. This is, of course, scandalous. A man is 
born as he is born. And he can as easily add 
a cubit to his stature as add kindliness to his 
heart. The feat never has been done, and never 
will be done. And yet we blame those who 
have not kindliness. We have the incredible, 
insufferable, and odious audacity to blame them. 
We think of them as though they had nothing 



38 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

to do but go into a shop and buy kindliness. I 
hear you say that kindliness of heart can be 
" cultivated." Well, I hate to have even the 
appearance of contradicting you, but it can only 
be cultivated in the botanical sense. You can't 
cultivate violets on a nettle. A philosopher has 
enjoined us to suffer fools gladly. He had more 
usefully enjoined us to suffer ill-natured persons 
gladly. ... I see that in a fit of absentminded- 
ness I have strayed into the pulpit. I descend. 



BREAKING WITH THE PAST 39 




III 
BREAKING WITH THE PAST 

N that dark morning we woke up, and 
it instantly occurred to us — or at any 
rate to those of us who have preserved 
some of our illusions and our nai'veie — that we 
had something to be cheerful about, some cause 
for a gay and strenuous vivacity; and then we 
remembered that it was New Year's Day, and 
there were those Resolutions to put into force! 
Of course, we all smile in a superior manner at 
the very mention of New Year's Resolutions; 
we pretend they are toys for children, and that 
we have long since ceased to regard them seri- 
ously as a possible aid to conduct. But we are 
such deceivers, such miserable, moral cowards, 
in such terror of appearing naive, that I for one 
am not to be taken in by that smile and that 
pretence. The individual who scoffs at New 
Year's Resolutions resembles the woman who 
says she does n't look under the bed at nights ; 
the truth is not in him, and in the very moment 



40 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

of his lying, could his cranium suddenly become 
transparent, we should see Resolutions burning 
brightly in his brain like lamps in Trafalgar 
Square. Of this I am convinced, that nineteen- 
twentieths of us got out of bed that morning 
animated by that special feeling of gay and 
strenuous vivacity which Resolutions alone can 
produce. And nineteen-twentieths of us were 
also conscious of a high virtue, forgetting that 
it is not the making of Resolutions, but the keep- 
ing of them, which renders pardonable the con- 
sciousness of virtue. 

And at this hour, while the activity of the 
Resolution is yet in full blast, I would wish to 
insist on the truism, obvious perhaps, but apt 
to be overlooked, that a man cannot go forward 
and stand still at the same time. Just as moral- 
ists have often animadverted upon the tendency 
to live in the future, so I would animadvert 
upon the tendency to live in the past. Because 
all around me I see men carefully tying them- 
selves with an unbreakable rope to an immovable 
post at the bottom of a hill and then struggling 
to climb the hill. If there is one Resolution more 
important than another it is the Resolution to 
break with the past. If life is not a continual 



BREAKING WITH THE PAST 41 

denial of the past, then it is nothing. This may 
seem a hard and callous doctrine, but you know 
there are aspects of common sense which de- 
cidedly are hard and callous. And one finds con- 
stantly in plain common-sense persons (O rare 
and select band!) a surprising quality of ruth- 
lessness mingled with softer traits. Have you 
not noticed it? The past is absolutely intract- 
able. One can't do anything with it. And an 
exaggerated attention to it is like an exaggerated 
attention to sepulchres — a sign of barbarism. 
Moreover, the past is usually the enemy of 
cheerfulness, and cheerfulness is a most precious 
attainment. 

Personally, I could even go so far as to ex- 
hibit hostility towards grief, and a marked 
hostility tovk^ards remorse — two states of mind 
which feed on the past instead of on the present. 
Remorse, which is not the same thing as re- 
pentance, serves no purpose that I have ever 
been able to discover. What one has done, one 
has done, and there 's an end of it. As a great 
prelate unforgettably said, " Things are what 
they are, and the consequences of them will be 
what they will be. Why, then, attempt to de- 



42 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

ceive ourselves " — that remorse for wickedness 
is a useful and praiseworthy exercise? Much 
better to forget. As a matter of fact, people 
" indulge " in remorse ; it is a somewhat vicious 
form of spiritual pleasure. Grief, of course, is 
different, and it must be handled with delicate 
consideration. Nevertheless, when I see, as one 
does see, a man or a woman dedicating existence 
to sorrow for the loss of a beloved creature, and 
the world tacitly applauding, my feeling is cer- 
tainly inimical. To my idea, that man or woman 
is not honouring, but dishonouring, the memory 
of the departed; society suffers, the individual 
suffers, and no earthly or heavenly good is 
achieved. Grief is of the past; it mars the pres- 
ent; it is a form of indulgence, and it ought 
to be bridled much more than it often is. The 
human heart is so large that mere remembrance 
should not be allowed to tyrannize over every 
part of it. 

But cases of remorse and absorbing grief are 
comparatively rare. What is not rare is that 
misguided loyalty to the past which dominates 
the lives of so many of us. I do not speak of 
leading principles, which are not likely to in- 



BREAKING WITH THE PAST 43 

commode us by changing; I speak of secondary 
yet still important things. We will not do 
so-and-so because we have never done it — as 
if that was a reason! Or we have always done 
so-and-so, therefore we must always do it — as 
if thai was logic! This disposition to an irra- 
tional Toryism is curiously discoverable in ad- 
vanced Radicals, and it will show itself in the 
veriest trifles. I remember such a man whose 
wife objected to his form of hat (not that I 
would call so crowning an affair as a hat a 
trifle!). "My dear," he protested, "I have al- 
ways worn this sort of hat. It may not suit me, 
but it is absolutely impossible for me to alter it 
now." However, she took him by means of an 
omnibus to a hat shop and bought him another 
hat and put it on his head, and made a present of 
the old one to the shop assistant, and marched 
him out of the shop. " There ! " she said, " you 
see how impossible it is." This is a parable. 
And I will not insult your intelligence by apply- 
ing it. 

The faculty that we chiefly need when we are 
in the resolution-making mood is the faculty of 
imagination, the faculty of looking at our lives 



44 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

as though we had never looked at them before 
— freshly, with a new eye. Supposing that you 
had been born mature and full of experience, 
and that yesterday had been the first day of 
your life, you would regard it to-day as an ex- 
periment, you would challenge each act in it, 
and you would probably arrange to-morrow in 
a manner that showed a healthy disrespect for 
yesterday. You certainly would not say : " I 
have done so-and-so once, therefore I must keep 
on doing it." The past is never more than an 
experiment. A genuine appreciation of this fact 
will make our new Resolutions more valuable 
and drastic than they usually are. I have a dim 
notion that the most useful Resolution for most 
of us would be to break quite fifty per cent, of 
all the vows we have ever made. " Do not ac- 
custom yourself to enchain your 'vola.UUiy with 
vows. . . . Take this warning; it is of great 
importance." (The wisdom is Johnson's, but I 
flatter myself on the italics.) 



SETTLING DOWN IN LIFE 45 



IV 

SETTLING DOWN IN LIFE 

THE other day a well-known English 
novelist asked me how old I thought 
she was, realty* " Well," I said to myself, 
** since she has asked for it, she shall have it ; I will 
be as true to life as her novels." So I replied 
audaciously : " Thirty-eight." I fancied I was 
erring if at all, on the side of " really," and I 
trembled. She laughed triumphantly. " I am 
forty-three," she said. The incident might have 
passed off entirely to my satisfaction had she not 
proceeded : " And now tell me how old yoa are." 
That was like a woman. Women imagine that 
men have no reticences, no pretty little vanities. 
What an error! Of course I could not be beaten 
in candour by a woman. I had to offer myself a 
burnt sacrifice to her curiosity, and I did it, 
bravely but not unflinchingly. And then after- 
wards the fact of my age remained with me, wor- 
ried me, obsessed me. I saw more clearly than 
ever before that age was telling on me. I could 



46 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

not be blind to the deliberation of my move- 
ments in climbing stairs and in dressing. Once 
upon a time the majority of persons I met in the 
street seemed much older than myself. It is 
different now. The change has come unper- 
ceived. There is a generation younger than 
mine that smokes cigars and falls in love. As- 
tounding! Once I could play left-wing forward 
for an hour and a half without dropping down 
dead. Once I could swim a hundred and fifty 
feet submerged at the bottom of a swimming- 
bath. Incredible! Simply incredible! . . . Can 
it be that I have already lived? 

And lo! I, at the age of nearly forty, am put- 
ting to myself the old questions concerning the 
intrinsic value of life, the fundamentally impor- 
tant questions: What have I got out of it? 
What am I likely to get out of it? In a word, 
what's it worth? If a man can ask himself a 
question more momentous, radical, and critical 
than these questions, I would like to know what 
it is. Innumerable philosophers have tried to 
answer these questions in a general way for the 
average individual, and possibly they have suc- 
ceeded pretty well. Possibly I might derive 



SETTLING DOWN IN LIFE 47 

benefit from a perusal of their answers. But do 
you suppose I am going to read them? Not 
I! Do you suppose that I can recall the wisdom 
that I happen already to have read? Not I! My 
mind is a perfect blank at this moment in regard 
to the wisdom of others on the essential ques- 
tion. Strange, is it not? But quite a common 
experience, I believe. Besides, I don't actually 
care twopence what any other philosopher has 
replied to my question. In this, each man must 
be his own philosopher. There is an instinct in 
the profound egoism of human nature which pre- 
vents us from accepting such ready-made an- 
swers. What is it to us what Plato thought? 
Nothing. And thus the question remains ever 
new, and ever unanswered, and ever of dramatic 
interest. The singular, the highly singular thing 
is — • and here I arrive at my point — that so few 
people put the question to themselves in time, 
that so many put it too late, or even die without 
putting it. 

I am firmly convinced that an immense pro- 
portion of my instructed fellow-creatures do not 
merely omit to strike the balance-sheet of their 
lives, they omit even the preliminary operation of 



48 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

taking stock. They go on, and on, and on, buying 
and selling they know not what, at unascertained 
prices, dropping money into the till and taking 
it out. They don't know what goods are in the 
shop, nor what amount is in the till, but they 
have a clear impression that the living-room 
behind the shop is by no means as luxurious and 
as well-ventilated as they would like it to be. 
And the years pass, and that beautiful furniture 
and that system of ventilation are not achieved. 
And then one day they die, and friends come to 
the funeral and remark : " Dear me ! How stuffy 
this room is, and the shop 's practically full of 
trash ! " Or, some little time before they are dead, 
they stay later than usual in the shop one even- 
ing, and make up their minds to take stock and 
count the till, and the disillusion lays them low, 
and they struggle into the living-room and mur- 
mur : " I shall never have that beautiful furniture, 
and I shall never have that system of ventilation. 
If I had known earlier, I would have at least got 
a few inexpensive cushions to go on with, and I 
would have put my fist through a pane in the 
window. But it 's too late now. I 'm used to 
Windsor chairs, and I should feel the draught 
horribly." 



SETTLING DOWN IN LIFE 49 

If I were a preacher, and if I had n't got more 
than enough to do in minding my own affairs, ^ ^ 
and if I could look any one in the face and deny . 
that I too had pursued for nearly forty years the %'--~J^ J 
great British policy of muddling through and 
hoping for the best — in short, if things were \., 
not what they are, I would hire the Alhambra 
Theatre or Exeter Hall of a Sunday night — 
preferably the Alhambra, because more people 
would come to my entertainment- — and I would 
invite all men and women over twenty-six. I 
would supply the seething crowd with what they 
desired in the way of bodily refreshment (except 
spirits — I would draw the line at poisons), and 
having got them and myself into a nice amiable 
expansive frame of mind, I would thus address 
them — of course in ringing eloquence that John 
Bright might have envied: 

Men and women (I would say), companions in 
the universal pastime of hiding one's head in the 
sand, — - 1 am about to impart to you the very 
essence of human wisdom. It is not abstract. 
It is a principle of daily application, affecting the 
daily round in its entirety, from the straphanging 
on the District Railway in the morning to the 



50 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

straphanging on the District Railway the next 
morning. Beware of hope, and beware of am- 
bition! Each is excellently tonic, like German 
competition, in moderation. But all of you are 
suffering from self-indulgence in the first, and 
very many of you are ruining your constitutions 
with the second. Be it known unto you, my 
dear men and women, that existence rightly con- 
sidered is a fair compromise between two in- 
stincts — the instinct of hoping one day to live, 
and the instinct to live here and now. In most 
of you the first instinct has simply got the other 
by the throat and is throttling it. Prepare to 
live by all means, but for heaven's sake do not 
forget to live. You will never have a better 
chance than you have at present. You may think 
you will have, but you are mistaken. Pardon this 
bluntness. Surely you are not so naive as to 
imagine that the road on the other side of that 
hill there is more beautiful than the piece you are 
now traversing! Hopes are never realized; for 
in the act of realization they become something 
else. Ambitions may be attained, but ambitions 
attained are rather like burnt coal, ninety per 
cent, of the heat generated has gone up the 
chimney instead of into the room. Nevertheless, 



SETTLING DOWN IN LIFE 51 

indulge in hopes and ambitions, which, though 
deceiving, are agreeable deceptions; let them 
cheat you a little, a lot. But do not let them 
cheat you too much. This that you are living 
now is life itself — it is much more life itself 
than that which you will be living twenty ji-ears 
hence. Grasp that truth. Dwell on it. Absorb 
it. Let it influence your conduct, to the end that 
neither the present nor the future be neglected. 
You search for happiness? Happiness is chiefly 
a matter of temperament. It is exceedingly im- 
probable that you will by struggling gain more 
happiness than you already possess. In fine, 
settle down at once into life* (Loud cheers.) 

The cheers would of course be for the re- 
freshments. 

There is no doubt that the mass of the audi- 
ence would consider that I had missed my voca- 
tion, and ought to have been a caterer instead of 
a preacher. But, once started, I would not be 
discouraged. I would keep on, Sunday night 
after Sunday night. Our leading advertisers 
have richly proved that the public will believe 
anything if they are told of it often enough. I 
would practise iteration, always with refresh- 



52 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

ments. In the result, it would dawn upon the 
corporate mind that there was some glimmering 
of sense in my doctrine, and people would at last 
begin to perceive the folly of neglecting to savour 
the present, the folly of assuming that the future 
can be essentially different from the present, the 
fatuity of dying before they have begun to live. 



MARRIAGE 53 



V 

MARRIAGE 

THE DUTY OF IT 

EVERY now and then it becomes neces- 
sary to deal faithfully with that im- 
mortal type of person, the praiser of 
the past at the expense of the present. I will 
not quote Horace, as by all the traditions of 
letters I ought to do, because Horace, like the 
incurable trimmer that he was, " hedged " on 
this question; and I do not admire him much 
either. The praiser of the past has been very 
rife lately. He has told us that pauperism and 
lunacy are mightily increasing, and though the 
exact opposite has been proved to be the case 
and he has apologized, he will have forgotten 
the correction in a few months, and will break 
out again into renewed lamentation. He has told 
us that we are physically deteriorating, and in 
such awful tones that we have shuddered, and 
many of us have believed. And considering that 



54 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

the death-rate is decreasing, that slums are de- 
creasing, that disease is decreasing, that the 
agricultural labourer eats more than ever he 
did, our credence does not do much credit to our 
reasoning powers, does it? Of course, there is 
that terrible " influx " into the towns, but I for 
one should be much interested to know wherein 
the existence of the rustic in times past was 
healthier than the existence of the town-dwellers 
of to-day. The personal appearance of agricul- 
tural veterans does not help me; they resemble 
starved 'bus-drivers twisted out of shape by 
lightning. 

But the piece de resistance of the praiser of the 
past is now marriage, with discreet hints about 
the birth-rate. The praiser of the past is going 
to have a magnificent time with the subject of 
marriage. The first moanings of the tempest 
have already been heard. Bishops have looked 
askance at the birth-rate, and have mentioned 
their displeasure. The matter is serious. As the 
phrase goes, "it strikes at the root." We are 
marrying later, my friends. Some of us, in the 
hurry and pre-occupation of business, are quite 
forgetting to marry. It is the duty of the citizen 



MARRIAGE 55 

to marry and have children, and we are neglect- 
ing our duty, we are growing selfish ! No longer 
are produced the glorious " quiverfuls " of old 
times! Our fathers married at twenty; we 
marry at thirty-five. Why? Because a gross 
and enervating luxury has overtaken us. What 
will become of England if this continues? There 
will be no England! Hence we must look to it! 
And so on, in the same strain. 

I should like to ask all those who have raised ^ 
and will raise such outcries. Have you read 
" X "? Now, the book that I refer to as " X " is 
a mysterious work, written rather more than a 
hundred years ago by an English curate. It is 
a classic of English science; indeed, it is one of 
the great scientific books of the world. It has 
immensely influenced all the scientific thought of 
the nineteenth century, especially Darwin's. 
Mr. H. G. Wells, as cited in " Chambers's Cyclo- 
paedia of English Literature," describes it as " the 
most ' shattering ' book that ever has or will be 
written." If I may make a personal reference, I 
would say that it affected me more deeply than 
any other scientific book that I have read. Al- 
though it is perfectly easy to understand, and 



56 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

free from the slightest technicality, it is the most 
misunderstood book in English literature, simply 
because it is not read. The current notion about 
it is utterly false. It might be a powerful instru- 
ment of education, general and sociological, but 
publishers will not reprint it — at least, they do 
not. And yet it is forty times more interesting 
and four hundred times more educational than 
Gilbert White's remarks on the birds of Selborne. 
I will leave you to guess what " X " is, but I 
do not offer a prize for the solution of a problem 
which a vast number of my readers will certainly 
solve at once. 

If those who are worrying themselves about 
the change in our system of marriage would read 
" X," they would probably cease from worrying. 
For they would perceive that they had been put- 
ting the cart before the horse; that they had 
elevated to the dignity of fundamental principles 
certain average rules of conduct which had 
sprung solely from certain average instincts in 
certain average conditions, and that they were 
now frightened because, the conditions having 
changed, the rules of conduct had changed with 
them. One of the truths that " X " makes clear 



MARRIAGE 57 

is that conduct conforms to conditions, and not 
conditions to conduct. 

The payment of taxes is a duty which the 
citizen owes to the state. Marriage, with the 
begetting of children, is not a duty which the 
citizen owes to the state. Marriage, with its 
consequences, is a matter of personal inclination 
and convenience. It never has been anything 
else, and it never will be anything else. How 
could it be otherwise? If a man goes against 
inclination and convenience in a matter where 
inclination is " of the essence of the contract," 
he merely presents the state with a discontented 
citizen (if not two) in exchange for a contented 
one! The happiness of the state is the sum of 
the happiness of all its citizens ; to decrease one's 
own happiness, then, is a singular way of doing 
one's duty to the state! Do you imagine that 
when people married early and much they did 
so from a sense of duty to the state — a sense 
of duty which our " modern, luxury " has weak- 
ened? I imagine they married simply because it 
suited 'em. They married from sheer selfishness, 
as all decent people do marry. And do those 
who clatter about the duty of marriage kiss the 



58 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

girls of their hearts with an eye to the general 
welfare ? I can fancy them saying, " My angel, 
I love you — from a sense of duty to the state. 
Let us rear innumerable progeny — from a sense 
of duty to the state." How charmed the girls 
would be! 

If the marrying age changes, if the birth-rate 
shows a sympathetic tendency to follow the 
death-rate (as it must — see "X"), no one need 
be alarmed. Elementary principles of right and 
wrong are not trembling on their bases. The 
human conscience is not silenced. The nation 
is not going to the dogs. Conduct is adjusting 
itself to new conditions, and that is all. We may 
not be able to see exactly hoiv conditions are 
changing; that is a detail; our descendants will 
see exactly; meanwhile the change in our con- 
duct affords us some clew. And although certain 
nervous persons do get alarmed, and do preach, 
and do " take measures," the rest of us may re- 
main placid in the sure faith that " measures " 
will avail nothing whatever. If there are two 
things set high above legislation, " movements," 
crusades, and preaching, one is the marrying 
age and the other is the birth-rate. For there 



MARRIAGE 59 

the supreme instinct comes along and stamps 
ruthlessly on all insincere reasonings and sham 
altruisms; stamps on everything, in fact, and 
blandly remarks : " I shall suit my own conven- 
ience, and no one but Nature herself (with a big, 
big N) shall talk to me. Don't pester me with 
Right and Wrong, I am Right and Wrong. ..." 
Having thus attempted to clear the ground a 
little of fudge, I propose next to offer a few 
simple remarks on marriage. 

THE ADVENTURE OF IT 

Having endeavoured to show that men do not, 
and should not, marry from a sense of duty to the 
state or to mankind, but simply and solely from 
an egoistic inclination to marry, I now proceed 
to the individual case of the man who is " in a 
position to marry " and whose affections are not 
employed. Of course, if he has fallen in love, 
unless he happens to be a person of extremely 
powerful will, he will not weigh the pros and 
cons of marriage; he will merely marry, and 
forty thousand cons will not prevent him. And 
he will be absolutely right and justified, just as 
the straw as it rushes down the current is abso- 



6o MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

lutely right and justified. But the privilege of 
falling in love is not given to everybody, and the 
inestimable privilege of falling deeply in love is 
given to few. However, the man whom circum- 
stances permit to marry but who is not in love, 
or is only slightly amorous, will still think of 
marriage. How will he think of it? 

I will tell you. In the first place, if he has 
reached the age of thirty unscathed by Aphrodite, 
he will reflect that that peculiar feeling of roman- 
tic expectation with which he gets up every 
morning would cease to exist after marriage — 
and it is a highly agreeable feeling ! In its stead, 
in moments of depression, he would have the 
feeling of having done something irremediable, 
of having definitely closed an avenue for the out- 
let of his individuality. (Kindly remember that 
I am not describing what this human man ought 
to think. I am describing what he does think.) 
In the second place, he will reflect that, after 
marriage, he could no longer expect the charm- 
ing welcomes which bachelors so often receive 
from women; he would be "done with" as a 
possibility, and he does not relish the prospect 
of being done with as a possibility. Such con- 



MARRIAGE 6i 

siderations, all connected more or less with the 
loss of " freedom " (oh, mysterious and thrilling 
word!), will affect his theoretical attitude. And 
be it known that even the freedom to be lonely 
and melancholy is still freedom. 

Other ideas will suggest themselves. One 
morning while brushing his hair he will see a 
gray hair, and, however young he may be, the 
anticipation of old age will come to him. A soli- 
tary old age! A senility dependent for its social 
and domestic requirements on condescending 
nephews and nieces, or even more distant rela- 
tions! Awful! Unthinkable! And his first 
movement, especially if he has read that terrible 
novel, "For/ comme la. Mort," of De Maupassant, 
is to rush out into the street and propose to the 
first girl he encounters, in order to avoid this 
dreadful nightmare of a solitary old age. But 
before he has got as far as the doorstep he re- 
flects further. Suppose he marries, and after 
twenty years his wife dies and leaves him a 
widower! He will still have a solitary old age, 
and a vastly more tragical one than if he had 
remained single. Marriage is not, therefore, a 
sure remedy for a solitary old age; it may in- 



62 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

tensify the evil. Children? But suppose he 
doesn't have any children! Suppose, there 
being children, they die — what anguish! Sup- 
pose merely that they are seriously ill and re- 
cover — what an ageing experience! Suppose 
they prove a disappointment — what endless 
regret ! Suppose they " turn out badly " (chil- 
dren do) — what shame ! Suppose he finally 
becomes dependent upon the grudging kindness 
of an ungrateful child — what a supreme humilia- 
tion! All these things are occurring constantly 
everywhere. Suppose his wife, having loved him, 
ceased to love him, or suppose he ceased to love 
his wife! Ces choses ne se commandeni pas — 
these things do not command themselves. Per- 
sonally, I should estimate that in not one per 
cent, even of romantic marriages are the husband 
and wife capable of passion for each other after 
three years. So brief is the violence of love! In 
perhaps thirty-three per cent, passion settles 
down into a tranquil affection — which is ideal. 
In fifty per cent, it sinks into sheer indifference, 
and one becomes used to one's wife or one's hus- 
band as to one's other habits. And in the re- 
maining sixteen per cent, it develops into dislike 
or detestation. Do you think my percentages are 



MARRIAGE 63 

wrong, you who have been married a long time 
and know what the world is? Well, you may 
modify them a little — you won't want to modify 
them much. 

The risk of finding one's self ultimately among 
the sixteen per cent, can be avoided by the simple 
expedient of not marrying. And by the same ex- 
pedient the other risks can be avoided, together 
with yet others that I have not mentioned. It is 
entirely obvious, then (in fact, I beg pardon for 
mentioning it), that the attitude towards mar- 
riage of the heart-free bachelor must be at best 
a highly cautious attitude. He knows he is al- 
ready in the frying-pan (none knows better), but, 
considering the propinquity of the fire, he doubts 
whether he had not better stay where he is. His 
life will be calmer, more like that of a hibernating 
snake; his sensibilities will be dulled; but the 
chances of poignant suffering will be very ma- 
terially reduced. 

So that the bachelor in a position to marry but 
not in love will assuredly decide in theory against 
marriage — that is to say, if he is timid, if he 
prefers frying-pans, if he is lacking in initiative, 
if he has the soul of a rat, if he wants to live as 



64 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

little as possible, if he hates his kind, if his ego- 
ism is of the miserable sort that dares not mingle 
with another's. But if he has been more happily 
gifted he will decide that the magnificent adven- 
ture is worth plunging into; the ineradicable 
and fine gambling instinct in him will urge him 
to take, at the first chance, a ticket in the only 
lottery permitted by the British Government. 
Because, after all, the mutual sense of owner- 
ship felt by the normal husband and the normal 
wife is something unique, something the like of 
which cannot be obtained without marriage. I 
saw a man and a woman at a sale the other 
day; I was too far off to hear them, but I could 
perceive they were having a most lively argu- 
ment — perhaps it was only about initials on 
pillowcases; they were absorbed in themselves; 
the world did not exist for them. And I thought ; 
" What miraculous exquisite Force is it that 
brings together that strange, sombre, laconic 
organism in a silk hat and a loose, black over- 
coat, and that strange, bright, vivacious, queru- 
lous, irrational organism in brilliant fur and 
feathers? " And when they moved away the 
most interesting phenomenon in the universe 
moved away. And I thought: "Just as no beer 



MARRIAGE 65 

is bad, but some beer is better than other beer, 
so no marriage is bad." The chief reward of 
marriage is something which marriage is bound 
to give — companionship whose mysterious irder- 
esUngness nothing can stale. A man may hate 
his wife so that she can't thread a needle without 
annoying him, but when he dies, or she dies, he 
will say : " Well, / <was mferested." And one 
always is. Said a bachelor of forty-six to me the 
other night : " Anything is better than the void." 

THE TWO WAYS OF IT 

Sabine and other summary methods of marry- 
ing being now abandoned by all nice people, 
there remain two broad general ways. The 
first is the English way. We let nature take 
her course. We give heed to the heart's 
cry. When, amid the hazards and accidents 
of the world, two souls " find each other," we 
rejoice. Our instinctive wish is that they shall 
marry, if the matter can anyhow be arranged. 
We frankly recognise the claim of romance in 
life, and we are prepared to make sacrifices to 
it. We see a young couple at the altar ; they are 
in love. Good! They are poor. So much the 
worse! But nevertheless we feel that love will 



66 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

pull them through. The revolting French system 
of bargain and barter is the one thing that we 
can neither comprehend nor pardon in the cus- 
toms of our great neighbours. We endeavour to 
be polite about that system; we simply cannot. 
It shocks our finest, tenderest feelings. It is so 
obviously contrary to nature. 

The second is the French way, just alluded to 
as bargain and barter. Now, if there is one 
thing a Frenchman can neither comprehend nor 
pardon in the customs of a race so marvellously 
practical and sagacious as ourselves, it is the 
English marriage system. He endeavours to be 
polite about it, and he succeeds. But it shocks 
his finest, tenderest feelings. He admits that it 
is in accordance with nature; but he is apt to 
argue that the whole progress of civilisation has 
been the result of an effort to get away from 
nature. " What ! Leave the most important re- 
lation into which a man can enter to the mercy 
of chance, when a mere gesture may arouse pas- 
sion, or the colour of a corsage induce desire! 
No, you English, you who are so self-controlled, 
you are not going seriously to defend that! You 
talk of love as though it lasted for ever. You 



MARRIAGE 67 

talk of sacrificing to love; but what you really 
sacrifice, or risk sacrificing, is the whole of the 
latter part of married existence for the sake of 
the first two or three years. Marriage is not one 
long honeymoon. We wish it were. When you 
agree to a marriage you fix your eyes on the 
honeymoon. When <we agree to a marriage we 
try to see it as it will be five or ten years hence. 
We assert that, in the average instance, five years 
after the wedding it does n't matter whether or 
not the parties were in love on the wedding-day. 
Hence we will not yield to the gusts of the mo- 
ment. Your system is, moreover, if we may be 
permitted the observation, a premium on im- 
providence; it is, to some extent, the result of 
improvidence. You can marry your daughters 
without dowries, and the ability to do so tempts 
you to neglect your plain duty to your daugh- 
ters, and you do not always resist the temptation. 
Do your marriages of ' romance ' turn out bet- 
ter than our marriages of prudence, of careful 
thought, of long foresight? We do not think 
they do." 

So much for the two ways. Patriotism being 
the last refuge of a scoundrel, according to 



68 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

Doctor Johnson, I have no intention of judging 
between them, as my heart prompts me to do, 
lest I should be accused of it. Nevertheless, I 
may hint that, while perfectly convinced by the 
admirable logic of the French, I am still, with 
the charming illogicalness of the English, in 
favour of romantic marriages (it being, of course, 
understood that dowries ought to be far more 
plentiful than they are in England). If a French- 
man accuses me of being ready to risk sacrificing 
the whole of the latter part of married life for 
the sake of the first two or three years, I would 
unhesitatingly reply : " Yes, I am ready to risk 
that sacrifice. I reckon the first two or three 
years are worth it." But, then, I am English, 
and therefore romantic by nature. Look at Lon- 
don, that city whose outstanding quality is its 
romantic quality; and look at the Englishwomen 
going their ways in the wonderful streets thereof ! 
Their very eyes are full of romance. They may, 
they do, lack chic^ but they are heroines of 
drama. Then look at Paris; there is little ro- 
mance in the fine right lines of Paris. Look at 
the Parisiennes. They are the most astounding 
and adorable women yet invented by nature. 
But they are n't romantic, you know. They 



MARRIAGE 69 

don't know what romance is. They are so 
matter-of-fact that when you think of their 
matter-of-factness it gives you a shiver in the 
small of your back. / 



To return. One may view the two ways in 
another light. Perhaps the difference between 
them is, fundamentally, less a difference between 
the ideas of two races than a difference between 
the ideas of two " times of life " ; and in France 
the elderly attitude predominates. As people get 
on in years, even English people, they are more 
and more in favour of the marriage of reason as 
against the marriage of romance. Young people, 
even French people, object strongly to the theory 
and practice of the marriage of reason. But 
with them the unique and precious ecstasy of 
youth is not past, whereas their elders have for- 
gotten its savour. Which is right? No one will 
ever be able to decide. But neither the one sys- 
tem nor the other will apply itself well to all or 
nearly all cases. There have been thousands of 
romantic marriages in England of which it may 
be said that it would have been better had the 
French system been in force to prevent their 
existence. And, equally, thousands of possible 



; 



70 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

romantic marriages have been prevented in 
France which, had the English system prevailed 
there, would have turned out excellently. The 
prevalence of dowries in England would not ren- 
der the English system perfect (for it must be 
remembered that money is only one of several 
ingredients in the French marriage), but it 
would considerably improve it. However, we 
are not a provident race, and we are not likely 
to become one. So our young men must rec- 
oncile themselves to the continued absence of 
dowries. 

The reader may be excused for imagining that 
I am at the end of my remarks, I am not. All 
that precedes is a mere preliminary to what 
follows. I want to regard the case of the man 
who has given the English system a fair trial 
and found it futile. Thus, we wait on chance 
in England. We wait for love to arrive. Sup- 
pose it doesn't arrive? Where is the English 
system then? Assume that a man in a position 
to marry reaches thirty-five or forty without 
having fallen in love. Why should he not try 
the French system for a change? Any marriage 
is better than none at all. Naturally, in England, 



MARRIAGE 71 

he couldn't go up to the Chosen Fair and an- 
nounce : " I am not precisely in love with you, 
but will you marry me ? " He would put it dif- 
ferently. And she would understand. And do 
you think she would refuse? 



72 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 



VI 
BOOKS 

THE PHYSICAL SIDE 

THE chief interest of many of my 
readers is avowedly books; they may, 
they probably do, profess other inter- 
ests, but they are primarily " bookmen," and 
when one is a bookman one is a bookman during 
about twenty-three and three-quarter hours in 
every day. Now, bookmen are capable of un- 
derstanding things about books which cannot 
be put into words; they are not like mere sub- 
scribers to circulating libraries ; for them a book 
is not just a book — it is a hook* If these 
lines should happen to catch the eye of any 
persons not bookmen, such persons may im- 
agine that I am writing nonsense; but I trust 
that the bookmen will comprehend me. And 
I venture, then, to offer a few reflections upon 
an aspect of modern bookishness that is becom- 



BOOKS 73 

ing more and more "actual" as the enterprise 
of publishers and the beneficent effects of edu- 
cation grow and increase together. I refer to 
" popular editions " of classics. 

Now, I am very grateful to the devisers of 
cheap and handy editions. The first book I ever 
bought was the first volume of the first modern 
series of presentable and really cheap reprints, 
namely, Macaulay's " Warren Hastings," in " Cas- 
sell's National Library " (sixpence, in cloth). 
That foundation stone of my library has un- 
fortunately disappeared beneath the successive 
deposits, but another volume of the same series, 
F. T. Palgrave's "Visions of England" (an 
otherwise scarce book), still remains to me 
through the vicissitudes of seventeen years of 
sale, purchase, and exchange, and I would not 
care to part with it. I have over two hundred 
volumes of that inestimable and incomparable 
series, " The Temple Classics," besides several 
hundred assorted volumes of various other 
series. And when I heard of the new " Every- 
man's Library," projected by that benefactor 
of bookmen, Mr. J. M. Dent, my first impas- 
sioned act was to sit down and write a postcard 



74 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

to my bookseller ordering George Finlay's " The 
Byzantine Empire," a work which has waited 
sixty years for popular recognition. So that I 
cannot be said to be really antagonistic to cheap 
reprints. 

Strong in this consciousness, I beg to state 
that cheap and handy reprints are " all very well 
in their way " — which is a manner of saying that 
they are not the Alpha and Omega of bookish- 
ness. By expending £20 yearly during the next 
five years a man might collect, in cheap and 
handy reprints, all that was worth having in 
classic English literature. But I for one would 
not be willing to regard such a library as a 
real library. I would regard it as only a cheap 
edition of a library. There would be something 
about it that would arouse in me a certain be- 
nevolent disdain, even though every volume was 
well printed on good paper and inoffensively 
bound. Why? Well, although it is rpy profes- 
sion in life to say what I feel in plain words, I 
do not know that in this connection I can say 
what I feel in plain words. I have to rely on a 
sympathetic comprehension of my attitude in the 
bookish breasts of my readers. 



BOOKS 75 

In the first place, I have an instinctive an- 
tipathy to a "series." I do not want "The 
Golden Legend " and " The Essays of Elia " uni- 
formed alike in a regiment of books. It makes 
me think of conscription and barracks. Even the 
noblest series of reprints ever planned (not at all 
cheap, either, nor heterogeneous in matter), the 
Tudor Translations, faintly annoys me in the mass. 
Its appearances in a series seems to me to rob a 
book of something very delicate and subtle in the 
aroma of its individuality — something which, it 
being inexplicable, I will not try to explain. 

In the second place, most cheap and handy 
reprints are small in size. They may be typo- 
graphically excellent, with large type and opaque 
paper; they may be convenient to handle; they 
may be surpassingly suitable for the pocket and 
the very thing for travel ; they may save precious 
space where shelf-room is limited; but they are 
small in size. And there is, as regards most 
literature, a distinct moral value in size. Do I 
carry my audience with me? I hope so. Let 
" Paradise Lost " be so produced that you can. 
put it in your waistcoat pocket, and it is no more 
" Paradise Lost." Milton needs a solid octavo 



76 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

form, with stoutish paper and long primer type. 
I have " Walpole's Letters " in Newnes's " Thin 
Paper Classics," a marvellous volume of near nine 
hundred pages, with a portrait and a good index 
and a beautiful binding, for three and six, and 
I am exceedingly indebted to Messrs. Newnes 
for creating that volume. It was sheer genius 
on their part to do so. I get charming sensa- 
tions from it, but sensations not so charming as 
I should get from Mrs. Paget Toynbee's many- 
volumed and grandiose edition, even aside from 
Mrs. Toynbee's erudite notes and the extra let- 
ters which she has been able to print. The same 
letter in Mrs. Toynbee's edition would have a 
higher assthetic and moral value for me than in 
the "editionlet" of Messrs. Newnes. The one 
cheap series v/hich satisfies my desire for size 
is Macmillan's " Library of English Classics," in 
which I have the " Travels " of that mythical 
personage, Sir John Mandeville. But it is only 
in paying for it that you know this edition to be 
cheap, for it measures nine inches by six inches 
by two inches. 

And in the third place, when one buys series, 
one only partially chooses one's books; they are 



BOOKS 77 

mainly chosen for one by the publisher. And 
even if they are not chosen for one by the pub- 
lisher, they are suggested to one by the publisher. 
Not so does the genuine bookman form his li- 
brary. The genuine bookman begins by having 
specific desires. His study of authorities gives 
him a demand, and the demand forces him to find 
the supply. He does not let the supply create the 
demand. Such a state of affairs would be al- 
most humiliating, almost like the parvenu who 
calls in the wholesale furnisher and decorator 
to provide him with a home. A library must 
be, primarily, the expression of the owner's 
personality. 

Let me assert again that I am strongly in fa- 
vour of cheap series of reprints. Their influence 
though not the very finest, is undisputably good. 
They are as great a boon as cheap bread. They 
are indispensable where money or space is lim- 
ited, and in travelling. They decidedly help to 
educate a taste for books that are neither cheap 
nor handy; and the most luxurious collectors 
may not afford to ignore them entirely. But they 
have their limitations, their disadvantages. They 
cannot form the backbone of a " proper " library. 



78 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

They make, however, admirable embroidery to a 
library. My own would look rather plain if it 
was stripped of them. 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF BOOK-BUYING 

For some considerable time I have been 
living, as regards books, with the minimum 
of comfort and decency — with, in fact, the 
bare necessaries of life, such necessaries 
being, in my case, sundry dictionaries, Boswell, 
an atlas, Wordsworth, an encyclopedia, Shake- 
spere, Whitaker, some De Maupassant, a poetical 
anthology, Verlaine, Baudelaire, a natural his- 
tory of my native county, an old directory of 
my native town. Sir Thomas Browne, Poe, Wal- 
pole's Letters, and a book of memoirs that I will 
not name. A curious list, you will say. Well, 
never mind ! We do not all care to eat beefsteak 
and chip potatoes off an oak table, with a foam- 
ing quart to the right hand. We have our idio- 
syncrasies. The point is that I existed on the 
bare necessaries of life (very healthy — doctors 
say) for a long time. And then, just lately, I 
summoned energy and caused fifteen hundred 
volumes to be transported to me; and I ar- 



BOOKS 79 

ranged them on shelves ; and I re-arranged them 
on shelves ; and I left them to arrange themselves 
on shelves. 

Well, you know, the way that I walk up and 
down in front of these volumes, whose faces I 
had half-forgotten, is perfectly infantile. It is like 
the way of a child at a menagerie. There, in its 
cage, is that 1839 edition of Shelley, edited by 
Mrs. Shelley, that I once nearly sold to the 
British Museum because the Keeper of Printed 
Books thought he hadn't got a copy — only he 
had! And there, in a cage by himself, because 
of his terrible hugeness, is the 1652 Paris edition 
of Montaigne's Essays. And so I might con- 
tinue, and so I would continue, were it not 
essential that I come to my argument. 

Do you suppose that the presence of these 
books, after our long separation, is making me 
read more than I did? Do you suppose I 
am engaged in looking up my favourite pas- 
sages? Not a bit. The other evening I had a 
long tram journey, and, before starting, I tried 
to select a book to take with me. I couldn't 
jfind one to suit just the tram-mood. As I had to 



8o MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

catch the tram I was obliged to settle on some- 
thing, and in the end I went off with nothing 
more original than " Hamlet," which I am really 
too familiar with. . . . Then I bought an even- 
ing paper, and read it all through, including ad- 
vertisements. So I said to myself : " This is a 
nice result of all my trouble to resume company 
with some of my books ! " However, as I have 
long since ceased to be surprised at the eccentric 
manner in which human nature refuses to act as 
one would have expected it to act, I was able to 
keep calm and unashamed during this extraordi- 
nary experience. And I am still walking up and 
down in front of my books and enjoying them 
without reading them. 

I wish to argue that a great deal of cant is 
talked (and written) about reading. Papers such 
as the " A thenaeum," which nevertheless I peruse 
with joy from end to end every week, can scarcely 
notice a new edition of a classic without express- 
ing, in a grieved and pessimistic tone, the fear 
that more people buy these agreeable editions, 
than read them. And if it is so? What then? 
Are we only to buy the books that we read? The 
question has merely to be thus bluntly put, and 



BOOKS 8i 

it answers itself. All impassioned bookmen, ex- 
cept a few who devote their whole lives to read- 
ing, have rows of books on their shelves which 
they have never read, and which they never will 
read. I know that 1 have hundreds such. My 
eye rests on the works of Berkeley in three 
volumes, with a preface by the Right Honourable 
Arthur James Balfour. I cannot conceive the 
circumstances under which I shall ever read 
Berkeley ; but I do not regret having bought him 
in a good edition, and I would buy him again if 
I had him not; for when I look at him some of 
his virtue passes into me; I am the better for 
him. A certain aroma of philosophy informs my 
soul, and I am less crude than I should otherwise 
be. This is not fancy, but fact. 

Taking Berkeley simply as an instance, I will 
utilise him a little further. I ought to have read 
Berkeley, you say; just as I ought to have 
read Spenser, Ben Jonson, George Eliot, Victor 
Hugo. Not at all. There is no " ought " about 
it. If the mass of obtainable first-class literature 
were, as it was perhaps a century ago, not too 
large to be assimilated by a man of ordinary lim- 
ited leisure tn his leisure and during the first 



82 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

half of his life, then possibly there might be an 
" ought '* about it. But the mass has grown un- 
manageable, even by those robust professional 
readers who can " grapple with whole libraries." 
And I am not a professional reader. I am a 
writer, just as I might be a hotel-keeper, a 
solicitor, a doctor, a grocer, or an earthenware 
manufacturer. I read in my scanty spare time, 
and I don't read in all my spare time, either. I 
have other distractions. I read what I feel in- 
clined to read, and I am conscious of no duty 
to finish a book that I don't care to finish. I 
read in my leisure, not from a sense of duty, 
not to improve myself, but solely because it gives 
me pleasure to read. Sometimes it takes me a 
month to get through one book. I expect my 
case is quite an average case. But am I going to 
fetter my buying to my reading? Not exactly! 
I want to have lots of books on my shelves 
because I know they are good, because I 
know they would amuse me, because I like 
to look at them, and because one day I might 
have a caprice to read them. (Berkeley, even 
thy turn may come!) In short, I want them be- 
cause I want them. And shall I be deterred 
from possessing them by the fear of some se- 



BOOKS 83 

questered and singular person, some person who 
has read vastly but who does n't know the dif- 
ference between a J. S. Muria cigar and an R. P. 
Muria, strolling in and bullying me with the 
dreadful query : " Sir, do you read your books ? " 

Therefore I say: In buying a book, be in- 
fluenced by two considerations only. Are you 
reasonably sure that it is a good book? Have you 
a desire to possess it? Do not be influenced by 
the probability or the improbability of your read- 
ing it. After all, one does read a certain propor- 
tion of what one buys. And further, instinct 
counts. The man who spends half a crown on 
Stubbs's " Early Plantagenets " instead of going 
into the Gaiety pit to see " The Spring Chicken," 
will probably be the sort of man who can suck 
goodness out of Stubbs's " Early Plantagenets " 
years before he bestirs himself to read it. 



MENTAL EFFICIENCY 



VII 
SUCCESS 

CANDID REMARKS 

THERE are times when the whole free 
and enlightened Press of the United 
Kingdom seems to become strangely 
interested in the subject of " success," of getting 
on in life. We are passing through such a period 
now. It would be difficult to name the prominent 
journalists who have not lately written, in some 
form or another, about success. Most singular 
phenomenon of all, Dr. Emil Reich has left Plato, 
duchesses, and Claridge's Hotel, in order to in- 
struct the million readers of a morning paper in 
the principles of success! What the million 
readers thought of the Doctor's stirring and 
strenuous sentences I will not imagine; but I 
know what I thought, as a plain man. After 
taking due cognizance of his airy play with the 
" constants " and " variables " of success, after 
watching him treat " energetics " (his wonderful 



SUCCESS 85 

new name for the " science " of success) as though 
because he had made it end in " ics " it resembled 
mathematics, I thought that the sublime and 
venerable art of mystification could no further 
go. If my fellow-pilgrim through this vale of 
woe, the average young man who arrives at 
Waterloo at 9.40 every morning with a cigarette 
in his mouth and a second-class season over his 
heart and vague aspirations in his soul, was half 
as mystified as I was, he has probably ere this 
decided that the science of success has all the dis- 
advantages of algebra without any of the ad- 
vantages of cricket, and that he may as well 
leave it alone lest evil should befall him. On the 
off-chance that he has come as yet to no decision 
about the science of success, I am determined to 
deal with the subject in a disturbingly candid 
manner. I feel that it is as dangerous to tell the 
truth about success as it is to tell the truth about 
the United States; but being thoroughly accus- 
tomed to the whistle of bullets round my head, 
I will nevertheless try. 

Most writers on success are, through sheer 
goodness of heart, wickedly disingenuous. For 
the basis of their argument is that nearly any 



86 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

one who gives his mind to it can achieve success. 
This is, to put it briefly, untrue. The very cen- 
tral idea of success is separation from the multi- 
tude of plain men; it is perhaps the only idea 
common to all the various sorts of success — dif- 
ferentiation from the crowd. To address the 
population at large, and tell it how to separate 
itself from itself, is merely silly. I am now, of 
course, using the word success in its ordinary 
sense. If human nature were more perfect than 
it is, success in life would mean an intimate 
knowledge of one's self and the achievement of 
a philosophic inward calm, and such a goal might 
well be reached by the majority of mortals. But 
to us success signifies something else. It may be 
divided into four branches: (i) Distinction in 
pure or applied science. This is the least gross 
of all forms of success as we regard it, for it 
frequently implies poverty, and it does not by 
any means always imply fame. (2) Distinction 
in the arts. Fame and adulation are usually 
implied in this, though they do not commonly 
bring riches with them. (3) Direct influence 
and power over the material lives of other men; 
that is to say, distinction in politics, national or 
local. (4) Success in amassing money. This 



SUCCESS 87 

last is the commonest and easiest. Most forms 
of success will fall under one of these heads. 
Are they possible to that renowned and much- 
flattered person, the man in the street? They 
are not, and well you know it, all you professors 
of the science of success ! Only a small minority 
of us can even become rich. 

Happily, while it is true that success in its 
common acceptation is, by its very essence, 
impossible to the majority, there is an accom- 
panying truth which adjusts the balance; to wit, 
that the majority do not desire success. This 
may seem a bold saying, but it is in accordance 
with the facts. Conceive the man in the street 
suddenly, by some miracle, invested with political 
power, and, of course, under the obligation to 
use it. He would be so upset, worried, wearied, 
and exasperated at the end of a week that he 
would be ready to give the eyes out of his head 
in order to get rid of it. As for success in science 
or in art, the average person's interest in such 
matters is so slight, compared with that of the 
man of science or the artist, that he cannot be 
said to have an interest in them. And supposing 
that distinction in them were thrust upon him he 



88 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

would rapidly lose that distinction by simple 
indifference and neglect. The average person 
certainly wants some money, and the average 
person does not usually rest until he has got as 
much as is needed for the satisfaction of his 
instinctive needs. He will move the heaven 
and earth of his environment to earn sufficient 
money for marriage in the " station " to which 
he has been accustomed; and precisely at that 
point his genuine desire for money will cease to 
be active. The average man has this in common 
with the most exceptional genius, that his career 
in its main contours is governed by his instincts. 
The average man flourishes and finds his ease 
in an atmosphere of peaceful routine. Men des- 
tined for success flourish and find their ease 
in an atmosphere of collision and disturbance. 
The two temperaments are diverse. Naturally 
the average man dreams vaguely, upon occasion; 
he dreams how nice it would be to be famous 
and rich. We all dream vaguely upon such 
things. But to dream vaguely is not to desire. 
I often tell myself that I would give anything to 
be the equal of Cinquevalli, the juggler, or to be 
the captain of the largest Atlantic liner. But 
the reflective part of me tells me that my yearn- 



SUCCESS 89 

ing to emulate these astonishing personages is 
not a genuine desire, and that its realization 
would not increase my happiness. 

To obtain a passably true notion of what hap- 
pens to the mass of mankind in its progress from 
the cradle to the grave, one must not attempt 
to survey a whole nation, nor even a great me- 
tropolis, nor even a very big city like Manchester 
or Liverpool. These panoramas are so immense 
and confusing that they defeat the observing eye. 
It is better to take a small town of, say, twenty 
or thirty thousand inhabitants — such a town as 
most of us knov/, more or less intimately. The 
extremely few individuals whose instincts mark 
them out to take part in the struggle for success 
can be identified at once. For the first thing they 
do is to leave the town. The air of the town is 
not bracing enough for them. Their nostrils 
dilate for something keener. Those who are left 
form a microcosm which is representative enough 
of the world at large. Between the ages of thirty 
and forty they begin to sort themselves out. In 
their own sphere they take their places. A dozen 
or so politicians form the town council and rule 
the town. Half a dozen business men stand for 



90 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

the town's commercial activity and its wealth. 
A few others teach science and art, or are locally 
known as botanists, geologists, amateurs of music, 
or amateurs of some other art. These are the 
distinguished, and it will be perceived that they 
cannot be more numerous than they are. What 
of the rest? Have they struggled for success 
and been beaten? Not they. Do they, as they 
grow old, resemble disappointed men? Not they. 
They have fulfilled themselves modestly. They 
have got what they genuinely tried to get. They 
have never even gone near the outskirts of the 
battle for success. But they have not failed. 
The number of failures is surprisingly small. 
You see a shabby, disappointed, ageing man flit 
down the main street, and someone replies to 
your inquiry : " That 's So-and-so, one of life's 
failures, poor fellow!" And the very tone in 
which the words are uttered proves the exces- 
sive rarity of the real failure. It goes without 
saying that the case of the handful who have left 
the town in search of the Success with the capital 
S has a tremendous interest of curiosity for the 
mass who remain. I will consider it. 



SUCCESS 91 



THE SUCCESSFUL AND THE 
UNSUCCESSFUL 

Having boldly stated that success is not, and 
cannot be, within grasp o£ the majority, I now 
proceed to state, as regards the minority, that 
they do not achieve it in the manner in which 
they are commonly supposed to achieve it. And 
I may add an expression of my thankfulness that 
they do not. The popular delusion is that suc- 
cess is attained by what I may call the " Benja- 
min Franklin " method. Franklin was a very 
great man; he united in his character a set of 
splendid qualities as various, in their different 
ways, as those possessed by Leonardo da Vinci. 
I have an immense admiration for him. But his 
Autobiography does make me angry. His Auto- 
biography is understood to be a classic, and if 
you say a word against it in the United States 
you are apt to get killed. I do not, however, 
contemplate an immediate visit to the United 
States, and I shall venture to assert that Benja- 
min Franklin's Autobiography is a detestable 
book and a misleading book. I can recall only 
two other volumes which I would more willingly 



92 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

revile. One is Samuel Budgett: The Successful 
Merchant and the other is From Log Cabin io 
While House, being the history of President 
Garfield. Such books may impose on boys, and 
it is conceivable that they do not harm boys 
(Franklin, by the way, began his Autobiography 
in the form of a letter to his son), but the grown 
man who can support them without nausea ought 
to go and see a doctor, for there is something 
wrong with him. 

" I began now," blandly remarks Franklin, 
" to have some acquaintance among the young 
people of the town that were lovers of reading, 
with whom I spent my evenings very pleasantly; 
and gained money hy my industry and frugality J** 
Or again : " It was about this time I conceived 
the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral 
perfection. ... I made a little book, in which I 
allotted a page for each of the virtues. I ruled 
each page with red ink, so as to have seven 
columns, one for each day of the week. ... I 
crossed these columns with thirteen red lines, 
marking the beginning of each line with the first 
letter of one of the virtues ; on which line, and in 
its proper column, I might mark, by a little black 



SUCCESS 93 

spot, every fault I found upon examination to 
have been committed respecting that virtue, upon 
that day." Shade of Franklin, where'er thou 
art, this is really a little bit stiff ! A man may be 
excused even such infamies of priggishness, but 
truly he ought not to go and write them down, 
especially to his son. And why the detail about 
red ink? If Franklin's . son was not driven to 
evil courses by the perusal of that monstrous 
Autobiography, he must have been a man almost 
as astounding as his father. Now Franklin could 
only have written his "immortal classic" from 
one of three motives: (i) Sheer conceit. He was 
a prig, but he was not conceited. (2) A desire 
that others should profit by his mistakes. He 
never made any mistakes. Now and again he 
emphasizes some trifling error, but that is " only 
his fun," (3) A desire that others should profit 
by the recital of his virtuous sagacity to reach 
a similar success. The last was undoubtedly his 
principal motive. Honest fellow, who happened 
to be a genius ! But the point is that his success 
was in no way the result of his virtuous 
sagacity. I would go further, and say that his 
dreadful virtuous sagacity often hindered his 
success. 



94 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

No one is a worse guide to success than your 
typical successful man. He seldom understands 
the reasons of his own success; and when he is 
asked by a popular magazine to give his experi- 
ences for the benefit of the youth of a whole na- 
tion, it is impossible for him to be natural and 
sincere. He knows the kind of thing that is ex- 
pected from him, and if he did n't come to Lon- 
don with half a crown in his pocket he probably 
did something equally silly, and he puts thai 
down, and the note of the article or interview is 
struck, and good-bye to genuine truth! There 
recently appeared in a daily paper an autobio- 
graphic-didactic article by one of the world's 
richest men which was the most " inadequate " 
article of the sort that I have ever come across. 
Successful men forget so much of their lives! 
Moreover, nothing is easier than to explain an 
accomplished fact in a nice, agreeable, conven- 
tional way. The entire business of success is a 
gigantic tacit conspiracy on the part of the 
minority to deceive the majority. 

Are successful men more industrious, frugal, 
and intelligent than men who are not successful? 
I maintain that they are not, and I have studied 



SUCCESS 95 

successful men at close quarters. One of the 
commonest characteristics of the successful man 
is his idleness, his immense capacity for wasting 
time. I stoutly assert that as a rule successful 
men are by habit comparatively idle. As for 
frugality, it is practically unknown among the 
successful classes: this statement applies with 
particular force to financiers. As for intelligence, 
I have over and over again been startled by the 
lack of intelligence in successful men. They are, 
indeed, capable of stupidities that would be the 
ruin of a plain clerk. And much of the talk in 
those circles which surround the successful man 
is devoted to the enumeration of instances of his 
lack of intelligence. Another point: successful 
men seldom succeed as the result of an ordered 
arrangement of their lives; they are the least 
methodical of creatures. Naturally when they 
have " arrived " they amuse themselves and im- 
press the majority by being convinced that right 
from the start, with a steady eye on the goal, they 
had carefully planned every foot of the route. 

No! Great success never depends on the 
practice of the humbler virtues, though it may 
occasionally depend on the practice of the prouder 



96 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

vices. Use industry, frugality, and common sense 
by all means, but do not expect that they will help 
you to success. Because they will not. I shall 
no doubt be told that what I have just written 
has an immoral tendency, and is a direct en- 
couragement to sloth, thriftlessness, etc. One of 
our chief national faults is our hypocritical de- 
sire to suppress the truth on the pretext that to 
admit it would encourage sin, whereas the real 
explanation is that we are afraid of the truth. I 
will not be guilty of that fault. I do like to look 
a fact in the face without blinking. I am fully 
persuaded that, per head, there is more of the 
virtues in the unsuccessful majority than in the 
successful minority. In London alone are there 
not hundreds of miles of streets crammed with 
industry, frugality, and prudence? Some of the 
most brilliant men I have known have been fail- 
ures, and not through lack of character either. 
And some of the least gifted have been marvel- 
lously successful. It is impossible to point to 
a single branch of human activity in which suc- 
cess can be explained by the conventional princi- 
ples that find general acceptance. I hear you, O 
reader, murmuring to yourself : " This is all very 
well, but he is simply being paradoxical for his 



SUCCESS 97 

own diversion." I would that I could persuade 
you of my intense seriousness! I have en- 
deavoured to show what does not make success. 
I will next endeavour to show what does make 
it. But my hope is forlorn. 

THE INWARDNESS OF SUCCESS 

Of course, one can no more explain success 
than one can explain Beethoven's C minor sym- 
phony. One may state what key it is written in, 
and make expert reflections upon its form, and 
catalogue its themes, and relate it to symphonies 
that preceded it and symphonies that followed it, 
but in the end one is reduced to saying that the 
C minor symphony is beautiful — because it is. 
In the same manner one is reduced to saying that 
the sole real difference between success and failure 
is that success succeeds. This being frankly ad- 
mitted at the outset, I will allow myself to as- 
sert that there are three sorts of success. Suc- 
cess A is the accidental sort. It is due to the 
thing we call chance, and to nothing else. We 
are all of us still very superstitious, and the 
caprices of chance have a singular effect upon 
us. Suppose that I go to Monte Carlo and an- 



98 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

nounce to a friend my firm conviction that red 
will turn up next time, and I back red for the 
maximum and red does turn up; my friend, in 
spite of his intellect, will vaguely attribute to 
me a mysterious power. Yet chance alone would 
be responsible. If I did that six times running 
all the players at the table would be interested 
in me. If I did it a dozen times all the players 
in the Casino would regard me with awe. Yet 
chance alone would be responsible. If I did it 
eighteen times my name would be in every news- 
paper in Europe. Yet chance alone would be 
responsible. I should be, in that department of 
human activity, an extremely successful man, and 
the vast majority of people would instinctively 
credit me with gifts that I do not possess. 

If such phenomena of superstition can occur 
in an affair where the agency of chance is open 
and avowed, how much more probable is it that 
people should refuse to be satisfied with the ex- 
planation of " sheer accident " in affairs where it 
is to the interest of the principal actors to con- 
ceal the role played by chance! Nevertheless, 
there can be no doubt in the minds of persons 
who have viewed success at close quarters that 



SUCCESS ^9 

a proportion of it is due solely and utterly to 
chance. Successful men flourish to-day, and 
have flourished in the past, who have no quality 
whatever to differentiate them from the multi- 
tude. Red has turned up for them a sufficient 
number of times, and the universal superstitious 
instinct not to believe in chance has accordingly 
surrounded them with a halo. It is merely ridicu- 
lous to say, as some do say, that success is never 
due to chance alone. Because nearly everybody 
is personally acquainted with reasonable proof, 
on a great or a small scale, to the contrary. 

The second sort of success, B, is that made by 
men who, while not gifted with first-class talents, 
have, beyond doubt, the talent to succeed. I 
should describe these men by saying that, 
though they deserve something, they do not de- 
serve the dazzling reward known as success. 
They strike us as overpaid. We meet them in 
all professions and trades, and we do not really 
respect them. They excite our curiosity, and 
perhaps our envy. They may rise very high in- 
deed, but they must always be unpleasantly 
conscious of a serious reservation in our attitude 
towards them. And if they could read their 



100 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

obituary notices they would assuredly discern 
therein a certain chilliness, however kindly we 
acted up to our great national motto o£ De 
mortuis nil nisi bunkum. It is this class of suc- 
cess which puzzles the social student. How 
comes it that men without any other talent pos- 
sess a mysterious and indefinable talent to suc- 
ceed? Well, it seems to me that such men always 
display certain characteristics. And the chief of 
these characteristics is the continual, insatiable 
ivish to succeed. They are preoccupied with the 
idea of succeeding. We others are not so pre- 
occupied. We dream of success at intervals, but 
we have not the passion for success. We don't 
lie awake at nights pondering upon it. 

The second characteristic of these men springs 
naturally from the first. They are always on the 
look-out. This does not mean that they are 
industrious. I stated in a previous article my 
belief that as a rule successful men are not par- 
ticularly industrious. A man on a raft with his 
shirt for a signal cannot be termed industrious, 
but he will keep his eyes open for a sail on the 
horizon. If he simply lies down and goes to 
sleep he may miss the chance of his life, in a 



SUCCESS loi 

very special sense. The man with the talent to 
succeed is the man on the raft who never goes 
to sleep. His indefatigable orb sweeps the main 
from sunset to sunset. Having sighted a sail, he 
gets up on his hind legs and waves that shirt in 
so determined a manner that the ship is bound 
to see him and take him off. Occasionally he 
plunges into the sea, risking sharks and other 
perils. If he does n't " get there," we hear noth- 
ing of him. If he does, some person will ulti- 
mately multiply by ten the number of sharks 
that he braved : that person is called a biographer. 

Let me drop the metaphor. Another char- 
acteristic of these men is that they seem to have 
the exact contrary of what is known as common 
sense. They will become enamoured of some en- 
terprise which infallibly impresses the average 
common-sense person as a mad and hopeless 
enterprise. The average common-sense person 
will demolish the hopes of that enterprise by in- 
controvertible argument. He will point out that 
it is foolish on the face of it, that it has never 
been attempted before, and that it responds to 
no need of humanity. He will say to himself: 
" This fellow with his precious enterprise has a 



102 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

twist in his brain. He can't reply to my argu- 
ments, and yet he obstinately persists in going 
on." And the man destined to success does go 
on. Perhaps the enterprise fails; it often fails; 
and then the average common-sense person ex- 
pends much breath in " I told you so's. But the 
man continues to be on the look-out. His thirst 
is unassuaged; his taste for enterprises fore- 
doomed to failure is incurable. And one day 
some enterprise foredoomed to failure develops 
into a success. We all hear of it. We all open 
our mouths and gape. Of the failures we have 
heard nothing. Once the man has achieved suc- 
cess, the thing becomes a habit with him. The 
difference between a success and a failure is 
often so slight that a reputation for succeeding 
will ensure success, and a reputation for failing 
will ensure failure. Chance plays an important 
part in such careers, but not a paramount part. 
One can only say that it is more useful to have 
luck at the beginning than later on. These 
" men of success " generally have pliable tem- 
peraments. They are not frequently un-moral, but 
they regard a conscience as a good servant and a 
bad master. They live in an atmosphere of 
compromise. 



SUCCESS 103 

There remains class C of success — the class of 
sheer high merit. I am not a pessimist, nor am I 
an optimist. I try to arrive at the truth, and I 
should say that in putting success C at ten per 
cent, of the sum total of all successes, I am being 
generous to class C. Not that I believe that 
vast quantities of merit go unappreciated. My 
reason for giving to Class C only a modest share 
is the fact that there is so little sheer high merit. 
And does it not stand to reason that high merit 
must be very exceptional? This sort of success 
needs no explanation, no accounting for. It is 
the justification of our singular belief in the 
principle of the triumph of justice, and it is 
among natural phenomena perhaps the only 
justification that can be advanced for that belief. 
And certainly when we behold the spectacle of 
genuine distinguished merit gaining, without 
undue delay and without the sacrifice of dignity 
or of conscience, the applause of the kind-hearted 
but obtuse and insensible majority of the human 
race, we have fair reason to hug ourselves. 



104 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 



VIII 
THE PETTY ARTIFICIALITIES 

THE phrase "petty artificialities," em- 
ployed by one of the correspondents 
in the great Simple Life argument, has 
stuck in my mind, although I gave it a plain in- 
timation that it was no longer wanted there. 
Perhaps it sheds more light than I had at first 
imagined on the mental state of the persons who 
use it when they wish to arraign the conditions of 
" modern life." A vituperative epithet is capable 
of making a big show. " Artificialities " is a suf- 
ficiently scornful word, but when you add 
" petty " you somehow give the quietus to the 
pretensions of modern life. Modern life had 
better hide its diminished head, after that. 
Modern life is settled and done for — in the 
opinion of those who have thrown the dart. Only 
it is n't done for, really, you know. " Petty," 
after all, means nothing in that connexion. Are 
there, then, artificialities which are not "petty," 



THE PETTY ARTIFICIALITIES 105 

which are noble, large, and grand? " Petty " 
means merely that the users of the word are 
just a little cross and out of temper. What they 
think they object to is artificialities of any kind, 
and so to get rid of their spleen they refer to 
" petty " artificialities. The device is a common 
one, and as brilliant as it is futile. Rude ad- 
jectives are like blank cartridge. They impress 
a vain people, including the birds of the air, but 
they do no execution. 

At the same time, let me admit that I deeply 
sympathize with the irritated users of the im- 
polite phrase "petty artificialities." For it does 
at any rate show a " divine discontent " ; it does 
prove a high dissatisfaction with conditions which 
at best are not the final expression of the eternal 
purpose. It does make for a sort of crude and 
churlish righteousness. I well know that feeling 
which induces one to spit out savagely the phrase 
"petty artificialities of modern life." One has it 
usually either on getting up or on going to bed. 
What a petty artificial business it is, getting up, 
even for a male! Shaving! Why shave? And 
then going to a drawer and choosing a necktie. 
Fancy an immortal soul, fancy a fragment of the 



io6 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

eternal and indestructible energy, which exists 
from everlasting to everlasting, deliberately ex- 
pending its activity on the choice of a necktie! 
Why a necktie? Then one goes downstairs and 
exchanges banal phrases with other immortals. 
And one can't start breakfast immediately, be- 
cause some sleepy mortal is late. 

Why babble? Why wait? Why not say 
straight out : " Go to the deuce, all of you ! 
Here it 's nearly ten o'clock, and me anxious 
to begin living the higher life at once instead of 
fiddling around in petty artificialities. Shut up, 
every one of you. Give me my bacon instantly, 
and let me gobble it down quick and be off. 
I 'm sick of your ceremonies ! " This would at 
any rate not be artificial. It would save time. 
And if a similar policy were strictly applied 
through the day, one could retire to a well-earned 
repose in the full assurance that the day had been 
simplified. The time for living the higher life, the 
time for pushing forward those vast schemes of 
self-improvement which we all cherish, would 
decidedly have been increased. One would not 
have that maddening feeling, which one so fre- 
quently does have when the shades of night are 



THE PETTY ARTIFICIALITIES 107 

falling fast, that the day had been "frittered 
away." And yet — and yet — -I gravely doubt 
whether this wholesale massacre of those poor 
petty artificialities would bring us appreciably 
nearer the millennium. 

For there is one thing, and a thing of funda- 
mental importance, which the revolutionists 
against petty artificialities always fail to appreci- 
ate, and that is the necessity and the value of 
convention. I cannot in a paragraph deal ef- 
fectively with this most difficult and complex 
question. I can only point the reader to analo- 
gous phenomena in the arts. All the arts are 
a conventionalization, an ordering of nature. 
Even in a garden you put the plants in rows, and 
you subordinate the well-being of one to the 
general well-being. The sole difference between 
a garden and the wild woods is a petty arti- 
ficiality. In writing a sonnet you actually cramp 
the profoundest emotional conceptions into a 
length and a number of lines and a jingling 
of like sounds arbitrarily fixed beforehand! 
Wordsworth's " The world is too much with 
us " is a solid, horrid mass of petty artificiality. 
Why could n't the fellow say what he meant and 



io8 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

have done with it, instead of making " powers " 
rhyme with " ours," and worrying himself to 
use exactly a hundred and forty syllables? As 
for music, the amount of time that must have 
been devoted to petty artificiality in the con- 
struction of an affair like Bach's Chaconne is 
simply staggering. Then look at pictures, ab- 
surdly confined in frames, with their ingenious 
contrasts of light and shade and mass against 
mass. Nothing but petty artificiality! In other 
words, nothing but " form " — " form " which is 
the basis of all beauty, whether material or 
otherwise. 

Now, what form is in art, conventions (petty 
artificialities) are in life. Just as you can have 
too much form in art, so you can have too much 
convention in life. But no art that is not planned 
in form is worth consideration, and no life that 
is not planned in convention can ever be satis- 
factory. Convention is not the essence of life, 
but it is the protecting garment and preserva- 
tive of life, and it is also one very valuable 
means by which life can express itself. It is 
largely symbolic; and symbols, while being ex- 
pressive, are also great time-savers. The de- 



THE PETTY ARTIFICIALITIES 109 

spisers of petty artificialities should think of this. 
Take the striking instance of that pettiest arti- 
ficiality, leaving cards. Well, searchers after the 
real, what would you substitute for it? If you 
dropped it and substituted nothing, the result 
would tend towards a loosening of the bonds of 
society, and it would tend towards the diminu- 
tion of the number of your friends. And if you 
dropped it and tried to substitute something less 
artificial and more real, you would accomplish no 
more than you accomplish with cards, you would 
inconvenience everybody, and waste a good deal 
of your own time. I cannot too strongly insist 
that the basis of convention is a symbolism, 
primarily meant to display a regard for the feel- 
ings of other people. If you do not display a re- 
gard for the feelings of other people, you may as 
well go and live on herbs in the desert. And if you 
are to display such a regard you cannot do it more 
expeditiously, at a smaller outlay of time and 
brains, than by adopting the code of conven- 
tion now generally practised. It comes to this 
— that you cannot have all the advantages of 
living in the desert while you are living in a so- 
ciety. It would be delightful for you if you 
could, but you can't. 



no MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

There are two further reasons for the con- 
tinuance of conventionality. And one is the 
mysterious but indisputable fact that the full 
beauty of an activity is never brought out until 
it is subjected to discipline and strict ordering and 
nice balancing. A life without petty artificiality 
would be the life of a tiger in the forest. A 
beautiful life, perhaps, a life of " burning bright," 
but not reaching the highest ideal of beauty! 
Laws and rules, forms and ceremonies are good 
in themselves, from a merely aesthetic point of 
view, apart from their social value and necessity. 

And the other reason is that one cannot always 
be at the full strain of " self-improvement," and 
" evolutionary progress," and generally beating 
the big drum. Human nature will not stand it. 
There is, if we will only be patient, ample time 
for the " artificial " as well as for the " real." 
Those persons who think that there isn't, ought 
to return to school and learn arithmetic. Sup- 
posing that all " petty artificialties " were sud- 
denly swept away, and we were able to show 
our regard and consideration for our fellow crea- 
tures by the swift processes of thought alone, we 
should find ourselves with a terrible lot of time 



THE PETTY ARTIFICIALITIES iii 

hanging heavy on our hands. We can no more 
spend all our waking hours in consciously striv- 
ing towards higher things than we can dine 
exclusively off jam. What frightful prigs we 
should become if we had nothing to do but cul- 
tivate our noblest faculties! I beg the despisers 
of artificiality to reflect upon these observations, 
however incomplete these observations may be, 
and to consider whether they would be quite 
content if they got what they are crying out for. 



112 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 



IX 

THE SECRET OF CONTENT 

I HAVE said lightly a propos of the conclu- 
sion arrived at by several correspondents 
and by myself that the cry for the simple 
life was merely a new form of the old cry for 
happiness, that I would explain what it was that 
made life worth living for me. The word has 
gone forth, and I must endeavour to redeem my 
promise. But I do so with qualms and with 
diffidence. First, there is the natural instinct 
against speaking of that which is in the core of 
one's mind. Second, there is the fear, nearly 
amounting to certainty, of being misunderstood 
or not comprehended at all. And third, there is 
the absurd insufficiency of space. However ! . . . 
For me, spiritual content (I will not use the word 
*' happiness," which implies too much) springs 
essentially from no mental or physical facts. It 
springs from the spiritual fact that there is some- 



THE SECRET OF CONTENT 113 

thing higher in man than the mind, and that 
that something can control the mind. Call that 
something the soul, or what you will. My sense 
of security amid the collisions of existence lies 
in the firm consciousness that just as my body 
is the servant of my mind, so is my mind the 
servant of me. An unruly servant, but a ser- 
vant — and possibly getting less unruly every 
day! Often have I said to that restive brain: 
" Now, O mind, sole means of communication 
between the divine me and all external phe- 
nomena, you are not a free agent; you are a 
subordinate; you are nothing but a piece of 
machinery; and obey me you sha.lL" 

The mind can only be conquered by regular 
meditation, by deciding beforehand what direc- 
tion its activity ought to take, and insisting that 
its activity takes that direction; also by never 
leaving it idle, undirected, masterless, to play at 
random like a child in the streets after dark. 
This is extremely difficult, but it can be done, 
and it is marvellously well worth doing. The 
fault of the epoch is the absence of meditative- 
ness. A sagacious man will strive to correct in 
himself the faults of his epoch. In some deep 



114 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

ways the twelfth century had advantages over 
the twentieth. It practised meditation. The 
twentieth does Sandow exercises. Meditation (I 
speak only for myself) is the least dispensable of 
the day's doings. What do I force my mind to 
meditate upon? Upon various things, but chiefly 
upon one. 

Namely, that Force, Energy, Life — the In- 
comprehensible has many names — is indestruc- 
tible, and that, in the last analysis, there is only 
one single, unique Force, Energy, Life. Science 
is gradually reducing all elements to one ele- 
ment. Science is making it increasingly difficult 
to conceive matter apart from spirit. Everything 
lives. Even my razor gets "tired." And the 
fatigue of my razor is no more nor less explicable 
than my fatigue after a passage of arms with my 
mind. The Force in it, and in me, has been trans- 
formed, not lost. All Force is the same force. 
Science just now has a tendency to call it elec- 
tricity ; but I am indifferent to such baptisms. The 
same Force prevades my razor, my cow in my 
field, and the central me which dominates my 
mind: the same force in different stages of evo- 
lution. And that Force persists for ever. In such 



THE SECRET OF CONTENT 115 

paths do I compel my mind to walk daily. Daily 
it has to recognize that the mysterious Ego con- 
trolling it is a part of that divine Force which 
exists from everlasting to everlasting, and which, 
in its ultimate atoms, nothing can harm. By 
such a course of training, even the mind, the 
coarse, practical mind, at last perceives that 
worldly accidents don't count. 

" But," you will exclaim, " this is nothing but 
the immortality of the soul over again ! " Well, 
in a slightly more abstract form, it is. (I never 
said I had discovered anything new.) I do not 
permit myself to be dogmatic about the persis- 
tence of personality, or even of individuality after 
death. But, in basing my physical and mental 
life on the assumption that there is something in 
me which is indestructible and essentially change- 
less, I go no further than science points. Yes, 
if it gives you pleasure, let us call it the im- 
mortality of the soul. If I miss my train, or my 
tailor disgraces himself, or I lose that earthly 
manifestation of Force that happens to be 
dearest to me, I say to my mind : " Mind, con- 
centrate your powers upon the full realization 
of the fact that I, your master, am immortal and 



ii6 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

beyond the reach of accidents." And my mind, 
knowing by this time that I am a hard master, 
obediently does so. Am I, a portion of the In- 
finite Force that existed billions of years ago, 
and which will exist billions of years hence, 
going to allow myself to be worried by any ter- 
restrial physical or mental event? I am not. As 
for the vicissitudes of my body, that servant of 
my servant, it had better keep its place, and 
not make too much fuss. Not that any fuss 
occurring in either of these outward envelopes 
of the eternal me could really disturb me. The 
eternal is calm; it has the best reason for 
being so. 

So you say to yourselves : " Here is a man in 
a penny weekly paper advocating daily medita- 
tion upon the immortality of the soul as a 
cure for discontent and unhappiness! A strange 
phenomenon ! " That it should be strange is an 
indictment of the epoch. My only reply to you 
is this: Try it. Of course, I freely grant that 
such meditation, while it " casts out fear," slowly 
kills desire and makes for a certain high indif- 
ference; and that the extinguishing of desire, 
with an accompanying indifference, be it high or 
low, is bad for youth. But I am not a youth, and 



THE SECRET OF CONTENT 117 

to-day I am writing for those who have tasted 
disillusion: which youth has not. Yet I would 
not have you believe that I scorn the brief joys 
of this world. My attitude towards them would 
fain be that of Socrates, as stated by the incom- 
parable Marcus Aurelius : " He knew how to 
lack, and how to enjoy, those things in the lack 
whereof most men show themselves weak; and 
in the fruition, intemperate." 

Besides commanding my mind to dwell upon 
the indestructibly and final omnipotence of 
the Force which is me, I command it to dwell 
upon the logical consequence of that unity of 
force which science is now beginning to teach. 
The same essential force that is me is also you* 
Says the Indian proverb : " I met a hundred 
men on the road to Delhi, and they were all 
my brothers." Yes, and they were all my twin 
brothers, if I may so express it, and a thousand 
times closer to me even than the common con- 
ception of twin brothers. We are all of us the 
same in essence; what separates us is merely 
differences in our respective stages of evolution. 
Constant reflection upon this fact must produce 
that universal sympathy which alone can pro- 



ii8 MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

duce a positive content. It must do away with 
such ridiculous feelings as blame, irritation, 
anger, resentment. It must establish in the 
mind an all-embracing tolerance. Until a man 
can look upon the drunkard in his drunkenness, 
and upon the wife-beater in his brutality, with 
pure and calm compassion; until his heart goes 
out instinctively to every other manifestation 
of the unique Force; until he is surcharged 
with an eager and unconquerable benevolence 
towards everything that lives; until he has 
utterly abandoned the presumptuous practice of 
judging and condemning — he will never attain 
real content. " Ah ! " you exclaim again, " he 
has nothing newer to tell us than that * the 
greatest of these is charity ' ! " I have not. It 
may strike you as excessively funny, but I have 
discovered nothing newer than that. I merely 
remind you of it. Thus it is, twins on the road 
to Delhi, by continual meditation upon the in- 
destructibility of Force, that I try to cultivate 
calm, and by continual meditation upon the one- 
ness of Force that I try to cultivate charity, 
being fully convinced that in calmness and in 
charity lies the secret of a placid if not ecstatic 
happiness. It is often said that no thinking 



THE SECRET OF CONTENT 119 

person can be happy in this world. My view 
is that the more a man thinks the more happy 
he is likely to be. I have spoken. I am over- 
whelmingly aware that I have spoken crudely, 
abruptly, inadequately, confusedly. 



THE END 



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